At last he heard Mario’s voice again. “Sue? It’s Matt. Was that Suzy who answered the phone? My God, she sounded so grown-up! . . . No, of course I didn’t tell her who I was. She wouldn’t remember anyhow.” There was another silence. “I got your message just a little while ago. I hope I didn’t wake you up . . . . Yes, I know that, honey. It’s a long story. I was broke and bumming around a lot of that time . . . . Yes. of course, that’s why I called . . . . Oh, right away, I guess unless you’re going to church—” He turned around, cupping the speaker with his palm. “Tom, is Bart picking you up in his car for this thing?” he called. At Tommy’s answer in asked, “Okay if I take the Chrysler, then?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Susan, I’ll be right over. How do I get there? . . . Oh, sure, I can find it, then . . . . Oh, you don’t have to do that honey, I can get some breakfast in the hotel . . . . All right, then, I’ll be there in half an hour. Give Suzy a hug from me . . . . Yes, sure, I’d like to speak to her . . . .”
Tommy turned on the shower full force. When he came out, Mario was dressed. In his lightweight summer suit, thin blue shirt, and dark tie, he looked like a stranger, like someone Tommy had never seen. He said, almost absentmindedly, “I’ve got to hunt up a drugstore that’s open and pick up an Easter basket for Suzy. Stuffed rabbit, or something.”
“They’ve got some in the motel gift shop.”
“That’s right, I remember. Tell Bart I said hello.” Suddenly he chuckled, low in his throat. “Hell, give him my love.”
He picked up the car keys from the dresser, started toward the door, then turned and came back. He put one arm around Tommy, hugging him against his shoulder, and brushed his cheek with his lips. He had not done this since Tommy was a child. He said, in a whisper, “Take it easy, Lucky,” and went out. Tommy’s eyes blurred with tears again. Mario couldn’t say it. He could never say it. But Tommy knew that in his own way Mario had been saying—as he had not been able to say since they had found each other again—I love you.
~o0o~
For breakfast, Bart and Tommy went to a place where the sports-car club gathered. It was filled with teenagers and men and women of all ages and apparently all social classes, for the cars parked outside varied from an old and battered MG which reminded Tommy of Stella’s ancient one, to sleek Alfa-Romeos, a Porsche or two, and half a dozen Jaguars. The room was filled with talk, mostly about cars, of which Tommy picked up snatches here and there.
Bart was listening, too, but suddenly he glanced at his watch. “Come on,” he said, “they’ll be drawing numbers for starts in five minutes.”
As they were heading toward the door, somebody called out, “Louise not with you this time?”
Bart shook his head without breaking stride and called back, “She doesn’t like having to do arithmetic.”
As they went out the door, Tommy asked, “Louise?”
“My wife. The studio likes us to be seen together occasionally, so I brought her along a couple of times. Only when she found out it wasn’t a race and she had to navigate and figure out an average speed, she got all upset. Don’t get me wrong—lots of women are damn good rally drivers, some better than men. But the only figures Louise can manage are thirty-six, twenty-two, thirty-six.” His face held wry amusement. “You can figure out an average without panicking, can’t you? Or does math scare you, too?”
“Anything short of a slide rule,” Tommy said, and Bart chuckled.
“Right. We don’t want to get thrown out for excess speed.”
That was the first surprise of the day. Somehow Tommy had still believed it would be something like a race, but the instructions handed out at the starting line startled him. He realized quickly that it was a different kind of competition. The success of their teamwork would depend on how quickly he could compute a complex route and signal Bart in a way that would leave his companion completely free to concentrate on the skillful and efficient handling of the car. He was surprised most at the need to keep their speed down to a very precisely computed average, since excess speed was penalized with more points than lateness at checkpoints. He found himself enjoying the challenge, even trying to spot the hidden checkpoints between the ones where they had to clock in—so drivers would not cheat and take shortcuts away from the assigned course, he supposed. Later Bart offered him a turn at the wheel. It was new to him, but his reflexes were excellent, and after a minute or two he managed to conquer the temptation to let the speed build up for its own sake.
It was the kind of thing he could never share with Mario. For Mario a car was something to get you from here to there, and back again, with as little thought for the mechanics as possible. Mario liked to drive fast, but it was sheer restlessness, not pleasure in the act of driving.
Tommy was surprised at what a relief and joy it could be to do something pleasurable, demanding, but entirely unrelated to flying—although requiring an equal amount of concentration and skill. He suspected this might have been one reason why, years ago, Papa Tony had tried so hard to teach him to play chess. He had noticed that Papa Tony and Angelo could get involved in a chess game and completely lose themselves in it until five minutes before a cue was called. By the time they came into the final checkpoint, less than three minutes off the clock time, he realized, with astonishment, that he had not thought once, all day, about Mario’s problems, or Sue-Lynn, or the television program, or the triple.
The prize went to a team in a Porsche—a lean, horsey-looking woman and her teenaged son—but Bart and Tommy took one of the three consolation prizes, a certificate from a service station entitling the holder to free car washes, fill-ups, and repairs totaling twenty dollars. Bart glanced at the location of the station, shrugged, and held it out to Tommy.
“Can you use it? I keep my car in North Hollywood, and they do all my car work—what I don’t do myself, that is. I’d never get down there.”
“Thanks, we can use it.” Tommy tucked it into his wallet.
Bart glanced at the darkening sky. “Let’s go get something to eat.” No allowance had been made for stopping during the rally, and despite their late breakfast Tommy was hungry. “Going to stay another night at that place near the circus grounds?”
“I guess so.” He still had the room key in his pocket, Mario, uncertain how long his business with Susan would take, had gone off without checking out.
“That Mexican place okay with you?” Bart hesitated. “Look, I’d enjoy taking you somewhere really nice. But—” and Tommy understood the hesitation. The burden he had forgotten for much of the day rushed over him again. Most elaborate restaurants catered to couples; only under the most impersonal and obviously business circumstances could two men dine together at a fine restaurant. And Bart’s tastes and inclinations were known to his studio, so that anywhere he went, and with anyone, was immediately suspect.
“Fine with me,” he said. “I’m not dressed for any fancy place, anyhow.” Bart looked relieved. As driving partners for the rally, everyone had seen them and no one paid the slightest attention to them. And then he remembered something Mario had said to him, before he was fifteen:
Look, if I introduce you somewhere as my kid brother, don’t contradict me. Okay? He had not understood. Not then.
God, have I got to live like this all my life? Never doing anything without stopping and thinking about whether somebody’s going to get the wrong idea? Or—hell—the right idea?
But what was the alternative? To be flagrant, a screaming swish of Eddie Keno’s type?
Halfway through dinner, Bart said abruptly, “Look, if you want to join the sports-car club, I’ll sponsor you. I need a driving partner. I have to take Louise along to these things about one time in four or five—the studio likes us to be seen together—but I’ve been looking for a steady partner. And as you can imagine,” he added, very low, dropping his voice to where they would not be overheard, “I need somebody who knows the score. Somebody I can trust, so it doesn’t matter if I let my guard
down for a minute or so. And—” He hesitated, then added, “Somebody who can pass as straight, not the kind you can spot a mile off.”
Tommy could understand that. “Sure, Bart. I’d like that, too. Matt and I were talking, the other day—maybe if we get any money out of this deal, I can pick up a proper car somewhere.”
“I can help you get hold of a secondhand MG,” Bart said. “Not cheap, exactly, but at least you won’t get skinned. Matt’s a good kid. I used to like going around with him even after we lost interest in sleeping together—he did tell you that, didn’t he?—because we could be seen anywhere and he wasn’t obvious. I feel like a goddamn hypocrite, talking that way,” he added vehemently, “but my job depends on it. And I had too much of playing crummy parts in crummy movies. I like making decent money, and I like living good —no reason I shouldn’t.”
“Me too,” Tommy said, “and anyway, I don’t figure my private life is anybody’s business but my own. I don’t see how it makes me all that honest to go around with a big label pasted on my forehead saying I AM QUEER. I mean there’s more to me than that. I don’t ask other guys what they do in bed.”
Bart laughed. “Well, I do sometimes,” he said with a brief, meaningful grin. “Okay, kid, I’ll put your name up. I never could get Matt interested in cars. I used to race sometimes, back then, and I took him with me to one of the speedway trials. He was real gutsy about it, but I could tell he didn’t enjoy it.”
“I went up to Le Mans once, but I don’t think that’s my kind of racing. It was kind of a bore, watching them go round and round. Though it must take a hell of a lot of skill.”
“It does, but racecourse driving isn’t really my thing. either. Like I told you, I rode passenger twice with Tony Rogers in the Mille Miglia. Cross-country racing, that’s I get a kick out of—the Mille Miglia, the Alpine run.”
“Yeah. I think I’d like that.”
“There’s nothing like it. Riding with Tony—well, I can kind of see how Matt felt. It takes a special kind of nerve to sit there, digging out a sandwich while your partner is going around a blind curve on a mountain road at a hundred and sixty, downhill and standing up on the accelerator. It never bothered me, because I knew Tony could handle the car whatever happened, but I can see how it would bother some people. We did the Mille Miglia in a Lancia, but we were out-classed and out-carred with all those Maseratis and Ferraris. We came in fourteenth. All things considered, we did a good race, though. We came in ahead of any of the other Lancias, and made better time than any of the Jags. The next year was the year I had the Ferrari, but we threw a tire in the first hundred miles, and then a brake shoe went. Tough luck, too; that year a Ferrari made first place.”
“You miss racing, don’t you?”
Bart shrugged. “I could quit. If you’re a real racer, you can’t quit unless you get killed first. I asked a violinist once if he could quit playing, and he said not unless his hands were off at the wrists. I was never that way. Tony was. I got a lot of fun out of racing, but when push came to shove, I knew I could give up racing, the way I damn near gave up eating, if that was what I had to do to hang on as an actor.” After a minute he added, “I think that’s why I want to do this Parrish film. Knowing Tony, and Matt, I can figure out from the inside what made him tick. Flying was something Parrish had to do, and when he couldn’t, he destroyed himself. I think Matt’s like that. I think he could have been the kind of dancer Nijinsky was, if he’d stuck with it. But dancing wasn’t what Matt had to do. And, the way I heard him talk, flying is.”
Tommy found that he couldn’t get words out of his tight throat. He had never guessed that Bart had this kind of understanding. How remorselessly he had judged the man, from his early posturing!
“And acting is what you have to do, Bart?” he asked finally.
“I guess so.” Bart’s grin was wry. “Hell, I even married the Lanart broad, which is what you might call a considerable sacrifice to my beloved art.”
Tommy sensed, ghostlike, where Mario had picked up something of his own ironic detachment. Bart was burlesquing it, but Tommy sensed a core of bitter honesty which gave him courage to ask, “Does your wife know? I mean, does she care, about you being—queer?”
“Know? Sure,” Bart said. “I wouldn’t marry any woman under false pretenses. Date her, maybe, but not marry her. I guess the studio put it up to Judy the same way they put it up to me. Her real name isn’t Louise Lanart, you know; it’s Judith Cohen. Far as I know, Judy has no love interest at all—I never knew her to warm up to anybody except her Siamese cats. That’s rough for a woman in this business. I guess she had to sleep with some of the wrong men before she could get to where she is, and it kind of wrecked her. Acting is something she has to do, too. She’s not a lesbian, either—might be simpler if she was. It’s just as devastating for it to get out that a woman is frigid as it is for it to get around that I prefer men. They said, if Judy and I got married, she wouldn’t have to date other men, and I wouldn’t have to come on romantic with half a dozen different dames every month or so. And of course I wouldn’t make any demands on her. So in public we’re a very devoted couple, and they figure being married to a good-looking guy makes her look sexier at the box office. Not that she needs much help in that direction.”
“I only saw her in a couple of movies. She’s very beautiful, though, I thought.”
“Oh, she is, she is. Not that I’m equipped to appreciate it,” Bart added with clinical detachment. “I kind of envy the kind of queer who can function with women. I know Matt can. Can you?”
“Sure,” Tommy said, “I don’t bother, though. Not anymore.”
“I can’t. I never could. You are over the age of consent, I trust?”
“Hell, yes, I did four years in the Army!”
“It must be the red hair, or the freckles. You have that all-American wholesome-kid look. Matt always did have a taste for San Quentin chicken. How old were you when he made you first, about ten?”
Really offended this time, Tommy said, “I was plenty old enough to know what I was up to. And,” he added, exasperated on Mario’s behalf, “just for your information, if there was any seducing done, I did it. It was me crawled in bed with him, not the other way around!”
“Just the same, I bet he made it damn obvious that his bed was all warmed up and waiting,” Bart said, laughing. “He was jailbait himself when I had him first. God, he was a beautiful kid! He’s not bad-looking now, of course. Wasn’t that marvelous flying he did last night? How is he, really, Tom?”
“Cross your fingers,” Tommy said. “He seems like he’s okay again.”
“Thank God. We need him in good shape for the Parrish movie. You should have heard the guys from the studio.” He pushed his plate away. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Want to come back to my place for a drink? I’ve got some pictures of Tony and me in the Ferrari.”
Behind the wheel of the MG again, Tommy let the speed grow on the deserted freeways, building and releasing tension, very conscious of Bart in the seat next to him. He understood what was happening, but it didn’t matter. He only asked very briefly, when they drew up outside the house, “What about your wife?”
“She has her own rooms on the second floor, and we never pay the slightest attention to each other’s guests. But anyhow, she’s gone to spend Easter with some friends in Acapulco.”
In the big room at the back of the house Bart had dozens of photographs: the Lancia, the Ferrari, signed pictures of some of the best-known racing drivers in the world. There was a picture of Mario and Bart at the ballet school, in the black sweaters and gray tights the men wore there, and Tommy examined it with a curious pain at his throat. He had never known Mario this young.
Abruptly, Bart took the photographs away from Tommy and put his arms around him. He touched him, experimentally, and made a questioning sound.
Tommy had known this was coming. Bart had been moving to this, gently but inexorably, since they had met. By coming here tonight he ha
d given at least implicit consent. All day, in the shared, hothouse atmosphere of the car, they had been indulging in something as intimate as foreplay, rousing one another with looks, touch, with every word. He found himself intensely aroused by the older man’s vitality, by everything—his looks, his dancer’s gracefulness, his warm breath against his cheek.
“You know I want you,” Bart said softly against his ear, “and I’ve seen you looking at me. Let’s go to bed.” Tommy did not withdraw, not an inch, but Bart said, “What’s the matter? You’re not naїve, surely—you knew perfectly well what I wanted.”
“Sure,” Tommy said. “Only—” He did not know he was going to say it until he heard his own words: “I don’t like doing things like this behind Matt’s back, that’s all.”
Bart put his hands on Tommy’s shoulders and turned him gently around. “Listen to me, Tom. You know how I feel about you, so you can say this is something I made up to con you into bed. I know how you feel about Matt. I know you love the guy. Hell, a blind man could see it. God forbid I should come between you two; the kind of thing you two have together, it doesn’t happen often among our kind of people. Hell, it doesn’t happen that often in marriage, even—for two people to love each other, care what happens to the other one, stay friends and partners even outside the sack. That’s something special, something everybody dreams about, not just homosexuals. And it doesn’t happen all that much. I thought Tony Rogers and I had something like that going for us. Only I was wrong about it.”
For a moment his face was closed and bitter. Then he said, “But there’s one thing you can’t do with that kind of a—a partnership, Tom. You can’t try and pretend it’s something it isn’t. And what it isn’t, is marriage.”
“Hell, I know that.” Tommy turned his face away, embarrassed.
“Do you? I wonder. That thing about faithfulness, about forsaking all others—that’s for teenagers not dry behind the ears, or it’s for mamas and papas raising children, where somebody else in the picture would rock the boat for the kids. It doesn’t work for men to try and play that game. Maybe two women could do it, I don’t know. But it’s no good for men. You try to play chastity and faithfulness and never touching anyone else and jealousy, you’ll wind up hating each other. I know, because I tried it once. You can’t belong to each other that way; you’re not his property any more than he is yours. I want you. It’s as simple as that. Do you really think it’s going to take anything away from Matt? Hell, you come down to that, I’m his friend, too, I love him. But what’s that got to do with anything?”
The Catch Trap Page 68