by Meg Wolitzer
“Ooh, I feel dizzy,” said Natalie, and Shawn sat her down on the floor. If you looked closely, you could see the occasional straight pin embedded in the field of pale carpeting. She leaned against the mirror and closed her eyes. “Sara and I always turned shopping into a big outing,” she said. “At the end of the day, before the department store closed, they would blink the lights, like when an intermission is over at the theater and you’re supposed to return to your seats. A voice would come over the intercom telling you that you had fifteen minutes of shopping time left. At that point, we’d just rev it up, as though we were on that old television show Supermarket Sweep, where they give you a limited amount of time to buy everything in sight.”
Natalie reached into her mesh shoulder bag and began to rummage around, finally fishing out a pack of cigarettes and offering one to Shawn. He accepted, and sat beside her against the mirror. She ran her thumb along the wheel of a lighter and lit first his cigarette, then hers. They smoked silently for a few moments.
“Shopping was a whole different ball game in my family,” Shawn finally said. “There were six of us kids back then.”
“Were?” said Natalie.
“Yes, now there’s five,” he continued. “My older brother Ray overdosed on methadone; he’d been in and out of residential treatment. But when we were kids, the six of us would squeeze into the back of the station wagon. We just bounced around in the back of that old car, with our mother or father screaming at us to shut up, to calm down, to stop fighting, whatever. Mostly we wore hand-me-downs—for years I would pretend I was Ray, because I always got his clothes. He was older, cooler, more regular than me, and I’d stand in front of the mirror looking at myself. There was this one shirt—it was in this totally awful seventies style, you know, with a little zipper that went halfway down the front, and the material was some spongy polyester blend. But I loved that shirt, because I could become Ray in it. I could be normal, straight, whatever. And when we all went shopping, I’d pay attention to what Ray was getting, because in a year or two it would be mine. We shopped at this huge store near our house called Kernicky’s Value Land,” he said. “It was like a warehouse; it not only had clothes, it also sold farm equipment and bizarre things like animal enemas. I said to my mother: I cannot buy a suit from a store that sells animal enemas. But she always said something like: Who are you to complain, you’re just one of six kids, so shut your trap.”
“‘Shut your trap.’ She actually said that? I think that’s terrible,” said Natalie. “Do you speak to her often now?”
“No,” said Shawn. “Almost never. Her secret wish is that I would get AIDS and die so she wouldn’t have to deal with me ever again.”
“No mother wishes that!” said Natalie. “But you’re not sick, Shawn, are you?”
“I don’t know, actually,” he said. “I haven’t been tested, and to tell you the truth, I’m a chicken about it. But some of the people I’ve slept with, they’ve already dropped dead. I tried to call one of them just to make sure he was alive, and it turned out his phone had been disconnected. It’s freaked me out, I have to say.”
“Then you must get tested,” said Natalie. “Tell Adam you want him to go with you and hold your hand.”
“No, no, I can’t,” said Shawn. “The subject freaks him out too. He was always a little paranoid about it, but now, with Sara and everything, I can’t ask him to deal with this, too. It’s my concern, not his. He doesn’t have to worry; we’ve only had ‘safe sex,’ as they say, and he was tested right before we met.”
“Then I will go with you myself,” said Natalie. “This afternoon. We’ll get in the car and we’ll—”
“No,” said Shawn. “Thank you, but no. It’s enough right now that I look halfway good in these clothes. That’s enough for today. Let me take it one step at a time.” He did look good; he knew it, and he was relieved. To be a gay man at the end of the twentieth century meant having to look good, unless you were Adam Langer, and then you could look sort of bad, but it didn’t matter. Usually, the men Shawn became involved with were as handsome as he was; together over dinner or in bed the men looked like an evenly matched set: two gleaming cufflinks, a pair of bookends. But he and these men often shared a kind of desperation, as though they all knew that they needed their looks to carry them through life. Their jobs were uniformly boring: paralegal, word processor, and, in Shawn’s case, telemarketing representative. The work lives of these young men were as dull as that of the dullest suburban dad on his way home to Scarsdale or Darien. But they had a secret code that kept them from sinking into despair, a system of flirting and winking and calling each other up and discussing who was fuckable, and who wasn’t.
He thought of Natalie’s offer to take him for an HIV test, and rejected it again in his mind. Five men he had been sexually involved with over the years had died: Steven H., Steven P., Jonathan from the gym, Andrew, and Donald the bartender at the Bedrock Club. One by one, like characters trapped in an old mansion in a mystery novel, the men had been knocked off. In the beginning, Shawn had assumed that it was a foregone conclusion that he would develop AIDS and die too. He had walked around with palpitations, giddy and expectant. But time kept passing, and to his astonishment there were no symptoms, not even a slight swelling of swollen glands in the neck, or a lingering cold, or fatigue. He knew men who regularly visited a local juice bar called Squeeze, where they ordered wheat grass cocktails, a bright green liquid that was served in tiny plastic cups. The men downed their miniature drinks, silently willing the liquid to provide them with energy and longevity and an invisible shield against infection. But still they fell ill, these men he saw at the gym, or knew from the clubs, or from his unsuccessful stint as a waiter, or from the week he had spent at a friend’s share in the Fire Island Pines (in a house that was, for the record, much nicer than this one). And still Shawn stayed healthy. Which didn’t necessarily mean it would last. It was entirely possible that one morning, a year from now, he would wake up with a rash, or an odd marking on his leg, and that would be that.
He often imagined his own death, the mourners filing into the funeral, none of them having been particularly close to him. His parents would probably refuse to come in from Michigan, out of some half-baked moral conviction. But his roommates would be there, already wondering who they could get to rent Shawn’s room, and a couple of his siblings would make the trip too, as well as the loose grouping of casual friends he had made over the years. But no one would be passionate about him if he died, the way Sara’s friends had been about her. No one would be hysterical, or driven half-mad, or endlessly obsessing and even deifying him, the way they did with Sara.
Since Sara Swerdlow died, Shawn’s worries about himself had gotten so extreme that he thought Natalie was right: He ought to find out his fate once and for all. As it was, he woke up every day not knowing. It occurred to him that he might suddenly weaken, and that his life might slide into oblivion, and he would die without ever having achieved anything, without a single song he had written having ever been sung aloud in a theater by professional actor-singers. But still he behaved as though not knowing his HIV status provided him a bright green, protective shield. He kept his boyishness alive, and in fact worked hard to preserve it, although in his heart he knew that this year, this summer perhaps, marked the very end of boyishness for him. And the realization made him long, more than anything, to have his musical produced.
For years, it had been acceptable to say you were a writer of musicals but to still make your living from telemarketing. It wasn’t a bad job, really. Most of the people you called hated you, and spoke back in truculent voices. In the background you could hear the clash of dinnerware, for you were invariably getting them smack in the middle of a meal. The overburdened American family had one brief moment of breaking bread together and you arrived to spoil it. Good evening, ma am, I’m calling from Advantage America, and we’d like to ask you a few questions about your leisure and entertainment needs. Often they were
bewildered, mouths full of food. Wht? Fmmf um, wahl, unh… But sometimes they’d come right out and say, “Fuck you, asshole!”
Occasionally, you would stumble upon a deeply lonely person over the telephone who would quickly agree to be interviewed, and then wouldn’t let you off the phone at the end of your survey. They’d actually invent reasons to keep you on the line, asking you to repeat the last question, or asking what other surveys they might participate in. They pulled you into the jaws of their lonesome misery, and you could easily picture their home: a studio apartment with a hotplate, or else the big, chilly house of a widow in a kelly green cardigan.
When the evening ended, very late (at 11:30 P.M. you could still call homes in the Pacific Time Zone), you and the other telemarketers would close up shop, shutting off the banks of fluorescent lights and heading down together in the elevator of this seedy but clean building in the West Thirties, a nowhere neighborhood dominated by Madison Square Garden and a long, slow crawl of taxicabs outside Penn Station. You’d hop onto the subway, or catch one of those cabs if you were feeling flush, and go back to your own home where, at any given hour, you yourself might get a phone call from a total stranger, asking if you had a few minutes to spare.
Now Shawn was away from the phone, away from his own shared apartment. His two roommates, Dirk and Arthur, one an actor/waiter and one a weight trainer/musician, seemed peeved that Shawn had escaped the city for a good chunk of August, despite the fact that he was all paid up on the rent. No one in New York could stand it when anyone else got a summer reprieve. It wasn’t exactly as though this beach house was much of an escape, anyway. The place was terrible, and everyone in it was depressed about their friend Sara’s death.
At first, after Sara died, Shawn had decided to bail out, but then he saw how needy Adam was, and how he could easily fill that need. It was pleasurable to make the famous young playwright indebted to him. Shawn brought him meals and rubbed his shoulders and held him in bed at night. How hard would it have been for Shawn to have written Take Us to Your Leader? If only Shawn had thought of it! But instead of contemporary, biting social comedy, he had opted for an old-fashioned musical, and everyone knew the musical was dead.
Spinsters! was singable and contained genuine characters, but it had very little chance of ever reaching a Broadway stage. It was a deeply unfashionable play for the nineties, whereas if Shawn had lived in the fifties, he would have been a celebrity in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition. Shawn would have been seen all around town, and asked to sit for photo shoots with Cartier-Bresson, and been interviewed by Walter Winchell and eaten shrimp cocktails late at night at Sardi’s. But the truth was that Shawn was out of style and no one was interested. Instead, everyone got all hot and bothered over plodding old Adam. So Shawn hung around the beach house, waiting.
And now this woman, Natalie Swerdlow, was here too, and she made everything much more tolerable for him. Her sadness made her seem deeply, soulfully kind; many wounded people appeared that way. Shawn wondered if his own mother would grieve for him if he died. She had once called Shawn up and asked, in her hard, heartland voice, whether he had “the AIDS.” There was something almost quaint about that “the.” It reminded him of old-fashioned stories, in which people developed “the chilblains.” Probably he was being unfair in his assessment of his mother, but in a way he thought she was actually disappointed that he didn’t (at least not yet) have the AIDS. For if he had, then she could be rid of him once and for all, then mourn him fiercely and get over it. But they were stuck with each other—the cold, narrow mother and her failed, misunderstood faggot son.
He looked over at Natalie Swerdlow, who sat beside him in the tiny room, and it occurred to him that she was nothing like his mother. She was endlessly tolerant, and that was all anyone really wanted, wasn’t it? Natalie was the kind of mother who for some reason was in awe of Shawn Best. Which no one else on earth would ever be.
“You don’t want to get all involved in my problems, my HIV status, my pathetic life,” he said to her. “You’ve got enough to deal with.”
“I need whatever I can get,” said Natalie. “If I just think about Sara and nothing else, I will go wild.”
“‘I’m wild again,’ “Shawn suddenly began to sing. “Beguiled again / A simpering, whimpering child again …’”
“‘Bewitched,’ “Natalie joined in, and together their two imperfect voices began to sing, “‘bothered and bewildered / am I…’”
They sat comfortably together and smoked and sang. She knew all the same show tunes that he did, and in fact had seen most of the famous shows when she was young. She had seen Ethel Merman in Gypsy, and Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly. They sang silly songs too, like “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” their voices rising in nostalgic pleasure. The carpeting was surprisingly spongy, and the store was cool, and they might have sat like that for a long time, singing freely and smoking many cigarettes, but suddenly, in the middle of a giddy rendition of the line that went “Rub him outta the roll call / and drum him outta your dreams …,” there was a loud knock at the door.
“Excuse me!” called the salesman. “Are you smoking in there?” They were quickly silent, looking at each other with a kind of desperate mirth. Natalie exhaled, filling the room with smoke. “You are!” cried the salesman triumphantly. “You are actually smoking in the dressing room! I’ll have to ask you both to leave. Right now.”
It hadn’t really occurred to either of them that smoking in the dressing room was a transgressive act. Now they quickly stamped out their cigarettes on the heels of their shoes and tried to wave the smoke from the air, but the room was so tiny that the smoke had nowhere to go. When they opened the door, it drifted out into the store. The salesman stood in front of them, rigidly clutching a bunch of wooden hangers. “Please purchase those clothes or remove them immediately,” he said. So Natalie went to the cash register and bought Shawn all the items, the credit card verification and the folding of the clothes taking place in haughty silence, and then they left the store. The little doorbell rang lightly once more as they crossed the threshold and went back outside, where they snorted and laughed like the adolescents that they had once both been, a long time ago.
8
Campfire Girls
There was a party one afternoon at a mansion on the water, and Adam was invited. He didn’t really want to go, but Shawn worked on him, telling him it would be good for him to get out of the house. This was true, of course, although Shawn’s motives surely had to do with his own desire to be at that party. Shawn longed for such invitations, Adam knew, and had rarely been able to edge his way into that world of wealth and canapés and light conversation.
On the day of the party, when Adam and Shawn came downstairs dressed in pale, slightly formal summer clothes, Natalie stood in the kitchen with her head in the refrigerator. She was ferreting through everything on the shelves, extracting ancient bottles and jars. She yanked hard on a bottle that gripped the glass shelf with its own glue. Finally the jar was uprooted, and Natalie peered in to see what it was.
“Chutney,” she said aloud to no one in particular. “Major Grey’s Peach Chutney. Does anyone know how old this is?”
Adam, standing in the doorway buttoning his cuffs, tried to recall. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “We got it three or four summers ago. We had an Indian dinner. I think it was Sara’s idea.”
Natalie gazed at the bottle with the thoughtful attentiveness of a mother gazing at her daughter’s face. “Sara was a chutney person,” she said quietly. She cradled the sorry-looking bottle in her hands, and at that moment Adam decided it was essential to get this woman out of the house. Otherwise, he could imagine her standing here forever, the refrigerator door left swinging wide, the chutney held tenderly in her useless hands. “Mrs. Swerdlow,” he said. “Finish what you’re doing and get dressed. You’re coming with us.”
THE PARTY WAS held at the home of Paul and Sheila Normandy, noted patrons of the ar
ts. Adam had initially met the couple backstage at a performance of his play; a stream of people often came backstage, including celebrities and friends of Adam’s parents (“It’s Adele Glucksman! From 15 Bluebird Court!”), as well as the mayor and a loose circle of wealthy friends of the producer, some of them Broadway investors. The Normandys fell into this last category, and while they hadn’t invested in his show, there would be future shows needing investors, and his agent, Mel Wolf, had wanted him to be charming backstage.
“But I don’t know how to be charming,” Adam nervously said to Sara after the curtain had come down one night and the actors were taking their bows. He and Sara sat in one of the tiny cinderblock dressing rooms; she was patiently retying his necktie, which he had knotted poorly, as usual.
“Yes you do,” she said. “They just want you to be yourself. The witty gay writer. Come on, you do that very well. You are charming, Adam; it’s not fake.”
Suddenly the Normandys appeared in the doorway of the dressing room, and Adam rose. His tie was neat now, and his hair newly combed. Sara had helped him become presentable, and he was grateful. Women did that, he thought; they tied your tie, they flooded you with confidence, and they were wonderful companions. He and Sara never ran out of things to talk about. She had been teaching him Japanese, and he had been reading plays with her. They had recently been through an Aristophanes phase and had just begun Tom Stoppard.
His lack of attraction to her was sometimes a source of frustration. He had never felt particularly bad about being homosexual; this frustration wasn’t grounded in self-loathing. Early on, Adam had known exactly what he was, what he liked, what pulled him into deep and tangled and exciting dreams. His parents had been fairly understanding, after a requisite crying jag and an insistence that he spend several sessions with a kindly female therapist in Great Neck. The therapist, Dr. Rachel Kline, was middle-aged and energetic and wore Indian-print dresses. She had found nothing wrong with Adam, and instead the two of them had played Yahtzee and shared a pot of raspberry tea during each chatty, friendly session.