“Of what?” said Curtis.
“Other people’s hygiene.”
“We didn’t have any reason to worry about other people’s hygiene! We had penicillin.”
“But we didn’t stop, even when we knew,” said Ned.
“Knew but didn’t believe,” said Curtis. “For a while, there was a gap, you know. On Friday we were rational, and celibate. On Saturday night we were terrified, and in bed with someone. We didn’t know Third World diseases. Doctors at the Ford Foundation knew about those. We didn’t know some Australian flight attendant was going to sleep with someone in Africa on Monday, and then with David on Fifty-first Street on Tuesday. Would you have believed me if I had taken you aside on one of these nights you loved, with Mario and Raul and Umberto in the front room, with the candles lighted and their beards and mustaches black as coal, and said to you: ‘Ned, don’t fall in love with them, they’re carrying a virus from Kinshasa that can shrivel you up to ninety pounds, give you cancer and kill you in two weeks!’ You’d have looked at me and said: What science fiction movie did you see on Times Square this afternoon, dear?” He put down his cigarette and said: “We knew, but we didn’t believe!”
“But why was I in love with Umberto and Mario anyway?” said Ned, standing up and turning around in a circle with his hands in his pockets.
“And Raul!”
“And Raul,” Ned said.
“Because they were good-looking, nice guys!”
“But why was I sleeping with them?”
“Because you wanted to merge your unity with their oneness,” said Mister Lark as he came into the room. “There are thirty-seven dialects in the Andes of Ecuador,” he said as he bent down to smell the irises, “and the word in one of them for potato is yoringo.” He straightened up and turned to us. “Curtis, Ned is turning bitter. Like Saint Augustine in middle age, he has decided to renounce his past, his sensual youth. A typical reaction to middle age. Tell him the virus is merely a tragic accident that has nothing to do with either Africa, or our sex lives. Tell him it does not invalidate the thing which still persists in the midst of all this horror—I mean,” he murmured, “the incalculable, the divine, the overwhelming, godlike beauty of the … male body. And then ask him about his bizarre explanation for Louis’ death—not to mention all of homosexual life. He thinks, silly boy, it is all centered on the penis!” he said, and, looking back over his shoulder, disappeared through the kitchen doorway, to use (I felt sure) the telephone.
“Leave me some message units!” Curtis shouted after him. But all he heard in response was the noise of dialing.
Curtis turned to Ned. “He’s right, you know,” said Curtis. “You can’t revise the past. There’s no point in introducing a fact which was not a fact at the time.”
“But we should have foreseen it,” said Ned.
“Oh,” said Curtis, tapping his cigarette against the ashtray and looking down at it, “there are lots of things we should have foreseen. But what did the man say? Life is understood backwards, but lived forwards. That’s the problem, dear.”
“You’re so rational,” sighed Ned.
“That’s what I told myself when I fell down on the boardwalk one night this summer on Fire Island and started screaming: We’re all going to die. We’re all going to die!”
“Did you do that?” said Ned.
“Ask Richard,” said Curtis. “He had to pick me up and calm me down.”
“Richard,” Ned said, glancing at the kitchen, “I don’t worry about at all.”
“Because he never has sex,” said Curtis. “He just talks to them. Sex for Richard is having dinner with the driver of the cab you just got out of. Sex for Richard is learning the word for potato in Inca.”
“There is no law in physics more implacable than the one in New York which says the moment someone exits a room, he will be discussed,” said Mister Lark, coming back into the room, with the scarf still around his shoulders, carrying Louis’s phone book in his hands as if it were a breviary. Curtis and Ned smiled.
“It’s only because you fascinate us,” said Curtis. “It’s only because we know nothing of your private life.”
“That is because I have no private life,” said Mister Lark. “I am entirely public. I spend my life in shower rooms and theater lobbies. Which is how I met Louis—sneaking into a matinee of My Fair Lady after the intermission. How many years ago.” He sighed. “The last person I was to call does not answer,” he said, sitting down in one of the cane-back chairs. “Have I ever told you how much I admire you all for not having answering machines?” he said.
“Why?” said Curtis.
“Because,” said Mister Lark, “you maintain, by not having one, ‘the pathos of distance.’ Nietzsche.” He sighed as he leafed through the little book whose binding was ripped and whose cover was gone—a book tom in half—and said: “Even Louis, toward the end, succumbed. Even Louis had an answering machine installed—”
“Because he was becoming very social,” said Ned.
“Very,” said Mister Lark.
“Curtis thinks Africa killed Louis, too.”
“Unless tomorrow a scientist announces it was all caused by chicken salad in a restaurant on Forty-first Street,” said Curtis. “Or fake fog in discotheques. Or the newsprint that comes off on your hands from the Sunday Times. The point is we don’t know,” he said. “The point is, we might as well be living in Beirut. Shall we go?” he said, standing up. “It’s almost eight o’clock.”
He and Ned went around the room blowing out the votive candles—as if extinguishing the decade—and Mister Lark turned off the Brazilian music. We paused at the edge of the room to put on our coats. “Take one last look,” said Curtis at the door. “In another year it’ll be a big white room filled with television sets showing video from Milan and L.A.”
“God!” said Ned. “No wonder everyone who works at the Whitney is always at the Mineshaft.”
And with a flick of his hand, Curtis plunged the room behind us into darkness, as if it too were just a theater set. We went down the worn stairs and emerged onto Madison Avenue, which looked exactly like what Mister Lark said it was after seven o’clock: The Gobi Desert. Nothingness stretched dreamily in both directions. Mister Lark led Curtis south into the darkness in search of taxis, and Ned, hands in his overcoat, his hair shining copper-bright in the light of the bookstore, surveyed the new titles in the window and then turned.
“This reminds me of old times,” he said, “except, of course, we’re going to Louis’s funeral. But all our evenings began just like this.”
“Were you all very close?” I said.
“Close?” he said. He looked at me. “We were the Four Supremes! And now Louis is the Dead Supreme. I still can’t understand it.”
“It must have been wonderful,” I said. “You must miss it a great deal.”
“Between you and me?” he said. “Not to leave this bus stop? I was very discouraged before all this began. I stayed in New York five years too many.”
“Why?”
“Because the first five years were magic,” he said, “and I kept hoping the second five would be too. But then you reach middle age, you’d rather have birds and trees and the sound of rain on the roof. That’s all. Curtis and Richard belong here. Some part of them never ages. Richard is like the cockroach—he’ll survive everything. When Curtis and I are gone, Richard’ll still be going to the Opera, looking for Jackie O. But I was ready to leave before I did. I was listening to the radio one night in Ohio, some woman with a great voice began to sing ‘More Than You Know.’ Have you ever heard the lyrics to ‘More Than You Know’?”
“Yes,” I said. “Something about man of my dreams.”
“ ‘Oh, how I’d die,’ ” he said, “ ‘oh, how I’d cry, if you got tired and said good-bye.’ Well, when I was in New York those first five years, I used to hear that song and turn to mush. When
I heard it last fall in Ohio one night in my car, I thought: This is the c
linical description of a masochist.” He smiled. “For the first five years, it was fun being a masochist.”
“And then? I said.
“Everything, including masochism,” he said, “becomes a habit after a while. And once it does, you should go. No one should live in this city unless he’s in a state of extreme romantic excitement. I’m no longer in a state of romantic excitement,” he said.
There was a silence. “Why not?” I said.
“I can’t romanticize this,” Ned said, nodding south. “I can’t romanticize taxicabs, or men with Spanish names. I … can’t romanticize me.”
“What can you romanticize?” I said.
“Budapest,” he said, “in a light snow. Having wine in a cafe, with a pale, handsome waiter with very bony hands.”
“So you still think you’ll fall in love, somewhere else …”
“Though the settings get more and more exotic,” he said. “In fact I’m happy just waking up in the morning. Louis, just before he died, was planning to go around the world.”
There were shouts, a flurry of raised arms; we looked south and saw a cab, captured, and our friends getting in. My heart was pounding when I reached them, either from the run or that never-failing feeling of excitement that accompanies the entrance of any cab in New York City; as if one renews one’s life each time a meter switches on. “Ah, Octavio,” Mister Lark was saying in that priestly voice as we got in. “And what part of Buenos Aires?”
BAD PICTURES
Patrick Hoctel
IN A HUMPHREY BOGART BIOGRAPHY, an interviewer asked Bogie why he’d done so many bad pictures when he’d had his pick of the good ones. Bogart answered that the good ones only came along once in a while, and the bad ones were steppingstones; he had to do them to make the good ones possible, to reach them. Without the bad ones, no one would’ve known he was still out there, and he wouldn’t have been considered for his great roles. If you’re out of the game too long, people forget you were ever in it, and after a while, so do you—I think.
Right after Anthony, I entered what I consider my post-slut, pre-nun phase, meaning I was celibate but still looking, still going out. Having been raised as a southern Presbyterian, I couldn’t escape the Protestant work ethic, which carried over into my private life as well—work creates work; lovers create lovers. Not unlike advertising. If you don’t advertise, then you won’t get any business. However, if you get some business, good or bad, you stick with it until the right business comes along.
Anthony. He was so dark. Burnt brown. Anthony had a crushed-up nose and a mouth that had come out of an only partially successful harelip operation. He was a Latino Jean-Paul Belmondo, that same sneer for a smile, the right side of his upper lip curling back over his teeth. I met him in a bar in the dry heat of a Tucson July. He was wearing English khaki hiking shorts, the kind with no zipper, just two buttons at the top, a yellow Indian cotton shirt, and dull red Giorgio Brutini sandals. I was entranced.
I kept remembering Breathless, how I’d seen it at nineteen, high on ’ludes and poppers, wishing I could push Jean Seberg off the screen and take her place; how at nineteen, I wanted to be the cause of one man’s downfall, to have one beautiful man say to me with his dying breath, “You really are a bitch, you know.”
Anthony invited me outside to smoke a joint. When he found out I was new to Tucson, he invited me to “A” mountain to see the lights of the city. His invites were delivered formally; he even seemed to bend a little at the waist, deferring to any choice I might make. Something in his manner made me flash on those smooth Latin types from the late 40s, early 50s—the ones everyone mixes up—Cesar Romero, Fernando Lamas, Ricardo Montalban. Charming but a little oily, and even when they were being romantic, they seemed to be mocking you at the same time (probably because you were SO Caucasian and unworldly). “If you would like to see the mountain? Or if you prefer I take you home?”
I went to the mountain. I told him about my teaching. He liked English, he said. And he liked my name, which he pronounced By-ron, as in Lord, not Bri-an, like most everyone else. I liked his pronunciation better. I learned he worked at the copper smelter in San Manuel. End of first illusion. He was not the semi-gangster, or at least dope smuggler (we were only two hours from the border), that I’d imagined; however, he did make $15.71 an hour, which allowed him to indulge in the finer things: good dope, a new ’81 Camaro with dark blue tinted glass, a stereo with speakers taller than either of us, and clothes off the pages of GQ.
After he pulled in front of my apartment, I got out and headed for the door, digging in my jeans for the key. When I didn’t hear steps behind me, I turned. He was still in the car. “You coming?” I asked.
“Do you wish me to?”
At twenty-four, I assumed that certain things were just understood. “Sure,” I said.
I had a studio apartment. Really, the only place to sit was the bed. We looked at picture albums, my family’s history. The family was important, Anthony said. Over an 8” by 10” of my brother’s ROTC Winter Formal, I kissed him. He kissed back. We kissed for an hour, exploring ears, the nape of the neck, shoulders. I bit his Adam’s apple and he let out a shudder of breath. The next day my lips were chapped and bloody. I had a stain on my throat the color of violets. At one point when I had unbuttoned his shirt and was carefully rolling his left nipple between my teeth and tongue, he tensed and drew back. “Should we remove our clothes now?” he wanted to know.
We both then stood and removed our clothes. Suddenly, we were shy. Before his shorts came off, Anthony dimmed the light over my bed. “I’m fat,” he said. He wasn’t. Returning from the kitchen after a quick gulp of cold water, I tripped over his sandal in the darkness and he caught me, gently pulling me up, making sure I never touched the ground.
IN THE MORNING HE TURNED the light on early, about seven. He had to go to work. He fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket; he was one of those people you couldn’t talk to until he had his first smoke. Then he spotted a poster on the opposite wall, a famous one of Marilyn Monroe, where her mouth is open so wide you can’t tell if she’s smiling or screaming, and her eyes heavy with mascara, the right one is winking, making her look like she’s crying. “She’s good,” Anthony said.
He began talking about Barbra. Babs. How she was the greatest singer and actress today. To my amazement, Anthony was what was known as a “Barbra Queen.” There were Judy Queens, Bette Queens, Dietrich Queens, Crawford Queens, and of course Liza Queens, but the Barbras were the worst. Had I seen HER version of A Star Is Born? Hello, Dolly? She was much better in that than the critics said, better than Channing. And why hadn’t she got the Oscar for The Way We Were?
The moment I closed the door on Anthony I knew part of me never wanted to see him again, but the mechanics were already in motion. We had arranged a date for the weekend, which since he suggested it, meant that I would have to propose something for next time, and so on. The dynamics of dating are not unlike the old Domino Theory—once one goes, then all the others fall; one push is all it takes. Besides, the silent times were great.
SO ONE NIGHT, MANY WEEKS LATER, driving in Anthony’s Camaro, he brought up a friend of his who’d been at the party we’d just come from and mentioned what a terrific guy this person was, really funny. This terrific guy, after discovering I was an English teacher, had launched into a ten minute tirade, in a jumbled mixture of English and Spanish, about how he had not been able to get a degree because he never could pass freshman composition and why couldn’t we all talk and write like we wanted to, anyway. Not thinking, too many Tanquerays past caring, I laughed and said his friend was a boor.
“Everyone bores you,” Anthony exploded in that red-in-the-face way special to drunks. “You and your fucking English Department friends, always talking about books and movies like you were Rex Reed or something.”
The Tanquerays were beginning to do their dirty work, because instead of remaining quiet or placating him, I snapped back. Maybe it was the Rex Ree
d comparison that got me. “All you ever do is get high,” I said, “or tight. You and your friends sit around and get wasted. And when you talk it’s about what’s on sale at Goldwater’s or what restaurant’s best for Sunday brunch.”
Anthony had been staring straight out the windshield, both hands on the wheel. He never looked me in the eye when he talked, fighting or not. The closest he ever came was about the middle of my chest. I’d thought it was another form of politeness, a kind of Latin deference, not looking directly at the person you’re addressing. Now I wondered if it wasn’t fear, a way to avoid whatever my face would tell him, or maybe I wasn’t important enough to gain his full attention.
“If I didn’t fuck you so good, you wouldn’t even be here,” he said.
He was right. The heat his brown skin pressed into mine and the sparks that came from his coarse, glossy black hair when we fucked, all around my fingers as I rubbed and scratched his head in the dark. Only in bed did we connect.
So now there was nowhere to go. We couldn’t go back and pretend he hadn’t said it, and sex wouldn’t be fun after that nugget of truth. But secretly I was glad, already I could scent the end approaching, new prowling, fresh meat. I laughed out loud at my image of myself as some kind of great cat out for the kill, forgetting for the moment that I was with someone; I was drunker than I had thought.
How Anthony interpreted this laugh I don’t know, but he reached over and grabbed me, kissed me, strangling the rest of my glee in my throat. I never saw him after that. Well, a few times in bars. He was always with a new boyfriend, always a Mexican: small, delicate, and pretty—black eyes, black silky hair (feathered bangs, sprayed back) and a compact, round ass. My exact physical opposite, I couldn’t help noticing. Cha-Cha Queens. Anthony had a stable of them, all cloned from the original, like a master negative yields multiple prints. He’d also gotten heavier, or maybe he’d always been heavy, like he’d said, and I’d never noticed.
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