Gay Place

by Billy Lee Brammer

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You want to leave?”

  “Not especially,” Roy said. “What I’d really like to do is sit down here and look at that place on your leg.” He showed her where. “It’s about the most desirable section of a woman I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  “Well,” she said. She sat down and examined her leg and said: “Looks like we’re making real progress. You think you might kiss me some more?”

  “I might kiss that place on your leg. Or lay my head up against it — that might be even better.”

  “I thought you were all set to change the rules? What about that meeting you were going to call? That other vote?”

  “Renewed convictions,” Roy said. “I’m feeling stronger — got whiskey in my veins now to make up for all that blood I lost.”

  “I thought you were making pretty good sense there for a while,” Ouida said. “Remember what you pointed out? If we’re going to be talked about anyhow, we might as well …”

  “I don’t want to get me in trouble,” Roy said, smiling.

  “I’m the one who’s going to be in trouble,” Ouida said. “I could mess up the divorce — if there’s going to be a divorce — and lose custody of the boy and bitch up everything, and I’m not complaining …”

  He leaned forward, splashing whiskey on his wrist, and kissed the place on her leg.

  “Kiss me here,” she said, showing him where. He kissed her throat. She moved her arms around him and touched the back of his neck. “I like you here,” she said. “It’s nice to find a neck that’s not shaved … In Florence last year, when Earle was running around with that lady parachutist, I’d go out walking in the afternoons just to look at the backs of men’s necks. They all had such nice shaggy necks.”

  “We’re both sick,” Roy said. “You like hairy necks. I like that place on your leg.”

  “Listen,” she said. “You made the point — I didn’t. If we’ve already made spectacles of ourselves, why not — if we’re going to suffer the consequences — take advantage of it?”

  “I want to have a semi-adult relationship,” Roy said. He kissed her again, for a longer period of time. “You make me feel clean all over,” he said.

  She backed off from him, smiling, slightly flushed. “You’ve got your propensities all in a conflict,” she said. “And they used to run in such clean straight lines … Where are my art objects, by the way?”

  “Storage,” Roy said. “All in storage … Except for the iron stewpot. Which I’ve donated to charity.”

  “Let’s go have a beer,” Ouida said. “Let’s go by the Dearly Beloved and give those people something really to talk about.”

  “What if Earle’s there?”

  “What if he is?”

  “All right,” Roy said.

  “Will you tell them you’re my lover?”

  “If you want … I’ll post it on the bulletin board, alongside the bowling scores.”

  “I’ll go next door and get the baby sitter,” Ouida said.

  He sat listening to record music. He thought about going out to the car and returning with several of the art objects. They might interest the boy; Earle the Third might have some fun with the corset model or the Orange Crush container. As for the Coolidge portrait, Roy had resolved to be entirely selfish about it: he couldn’t possibly give up the portrait of President Coolidge. Though he’d nearly been forced to part with it the night before when he was stopped by the policeman. He remembered the policeman distinctly; the fellow had stopped him on the night before just after he’d dropped Ouida at home. He hadn’t been driving recklessly; rather not recklessly enough to avoid suspicion. He remembered driving down the main street of the city at two in the morning, holding the last of the wine in his lap, driving very slowly and perhaps weaving a little, bending his head to get a better look at the lighted Capitol dome and the awful store fronts. Then the nice policeman had come upon him from behind, honking and flashing his red light. He had come round to Roy’s door, sniffing his breath and demanding that he walk the chalked line. Roy would have liked to go back now and find that chalked line, pry up a section of the street and take it home to hang above his fireplace for all his friends to come see: he’d walked the goddam chalked line as if he’d been training for it for years. Then the policeman had noted the backseat full of the art objects. “What’s all this?” he said. “Looks like you’ve been looting a store …” He was prepared to take Roy into the station house then, until Roy produced his legislator’s credentials with the cards signed by the Governor and the Speaker of the House and the Chief of Police and the captain of the Rangers. The officer had become all fatherly and protective at that point, looking after his favorite young politician, and Roy had been permitted to drive on, inconvenienced only by the relinquishing of his half bottle of wine …

  They’d traveled all over on the day before, all day and all over three counties, hundreds of miles through the hills and the low country, and never being, so far as could be determined by the semiprecious county maps (provided all high state officials) more than thirty or forty miles away from the Capitol dome. They had traveled over the backroads that led through the hills and down and out and past Indian forts and historic creeks, ancient iron bridges and endless small towns. Ouida had been charmed by the towns; she repeated the names aloud all afternoon: Pflugerville and Utley and Bastrop and Rosanky and Spicewood and Drippin’ Springs … After the first hour on the road and the first bottle of wine, they fell into a rhythm for the day, with rather special rituals to be observed and referred to only in fixed, vaguely esoteric terminology. What had begun as a plan for nothing more ambitious than a picnic in the country was soon transformed into a sort of progressive dinner on a grand scale … chicken leg in Rosanky … slug of wine in Bastrop … deviled eggs in Drip-pin’ … with backyard dancing and speeches out under the elm trees, organized games and favors for the guests. Roy, it soon developed, had a propensity to consume, which he indulged at every opportunity, usually on an art object. Ouida decided everything was either quaint or charming; she sent a number of postcards to friends in the city (the highest buildings of which were frequently visible from the hills), mentioning a charming iron bridge or a quaint corn silo and noting how, despite the uncommonly warm days, they’d slept under blankets every evening. And there was the business about the legends … “Legend has it,” one of them would say, glancing at the guidebook until resorting to invention, “Legend has it that the charming stone privy we just passed was once inhabited by immigrant German noblemen who, forsaking the pomp and ceremony of European drawing rooms, came to the New World during the last century seeking economic freedom and Cherokee poontang …”

  They bought art objects all over three counties. Roy would see one of the phony antique shops up ahead and would immediately hit the brakes, saying, “I’ve got a sudden propensity to consume.” “That’s a good thing,” Ouida had said to him once. “I’ve got a terrible propensity to use the ladies’ room …” They had bought the stewpot during the first of their antique store stops. The others were irresistible after that: Ouida had wanted the corset model; farther down the road he had picked up the Coolidge portrait, and there followed in easy succession more than a half-dozen purchases through the day. The ghost town had been the climactic event. The ghost store, rather. What little remained of the town was now converted into a group of decaying, pitched-roof farm outbuildings. But the store itself yielded up a treasure: high button shoes, patent medicines, hard black farmers’ hats, faded sunbonnets, the pasteboard containers collapsed and mildewed and strewn with rat droppings. The store had been closed down — never to reopen — during the first year of the Depression, its stock intact and still on display. There were WARNING signs all about, with painted KEEP OUT admonitions and underscored notations in finer print that trespassers had and would be prosecuted. Roy assured Ouida there was nothing to worry about. If called to account for their actions, they would identify themselves as members of a
special legislative committee appointed to investigate small business failures.

  Now he sat in the front room of the apartment, listening to record music, trying to recall the speech he’d made to her from the magnolia tree on the evening before. Scarcely a particle of it came to him now … He couldn’t seem to get past those opening lines: “Most High and Mighty Ouida … My High Tower … My Dear Miss Lady Love …” When memory failed him, he continued mumbling to himself, an extemporaneous speech made under the breath: “I am come to you today, My Friend, a chaste … a chastened man … censured is the word for it round here, and I want my one lady friend out there to know — I’m sure she’ll be gratified to know — and I’m proud to state, My Friend — that (where was I?) my … (oh yes) only regret is that I have but one married lover and lady friend mistress to give up for my country …”

  “Where ya’ll going?”

  The little boy had wandered into the room, rubbing his eyes, interrupting Roy’s speech. Roy tried to mark the place mentally where he had left off in the discourse with himself. He turned to the boy and said, “Hello, Earle Cummins Fielding. The Third.”

  “Will you come see me tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will we go out on your boat?”

  “No.”

  The boy got down on his hands and knees and crawled round the room, snorting. He looked up suddenly and said: “What am I, Roy? Hey, what am I?”

  “Armadillo?”

  “No!”

  “Platypus?”

  “No … What’s a platypus?”

  “I think,” Roy said, “I’m almost certain … it’s a species of roothog.”

  “Hey! That’s it!” He got to his feet and said: “When we going out on your boat?”

  “Soon,” Roy said. “It’s bound to be soon.”

  There was a sound of footsteps on the front porch, and the boy moved toward his bedroom, vastly pleased with himself. “Have nice time,” he said, looking back and grinning before he vanished down the hall.

  Four

  THERE WERE SEVERAL TABLES pushed together now to accommodate all their friends. The beer garden was filling rapidly, and dancing had begun on a small concrete slab. Someone had taken Willie’s chair next to Ellen Streeter; he had circled the tables several times, examining people, before settling at the far end, across from a young man named Harris McElhannon. Willie liked Harris all right, but it was Harris’s date that drew him to this end of the table.

  “Hello, Willie,” Harris said, barely looking up, his attention fastened instead on what the politicians were saying at the other end of the table. Willie sat down and stared at the girl, who seemed to have her mind on better things than politicians. After a minute or so, Harris turned back to his date and said: “Cathryn, this is Willie … Willie — Cathryn Lemens. Cathryn teaches at the college.”

  Willie and the girl exchanged glances and Harris turned back to the politicians. She was nothing really extraordinary, Willie decided, but she was a new one. That was something. They were such an incestuous bunch, any unfamiliar face was a welcome addition. Giffen, Huggins, and Rinemiller had already come round to greet Harris, exchange a few words, and look over the girl. Now Willie commenced his own inspection. The girl smiled at him absently. Fats Domino sang to them about getting married and going to Paris.

  Harris got abruptly to his feet and stared around menacingly, grinding his teeth, flexing muscles in his arms. They were all used to Harris by now — he had once told a legislator’s wife with whom he was carrying on that Alan Ladd in the motion picture Shane had changed his life. He wore specially tailored shirts with three-quarter length sleeves and tight western trousers with piping along the pockets that suggested a small child’s cowboy outfit. He was a salesman of used cars.

  “Excuse me,” Harris said, setting his jaw and moving off in short strides toward the men’s room. He was actually a very attractive young man. He was out of law school by a year or two, and when he was not involved in someone’s political campaign, he worked in used car lots, selling on commission. It did not much matter where Harris found employment. His family had a good deal of money and could be depended on for generous contributions to anyone’s campaign for whom Harris might have a special affection at the moment.

  The girl looked at the dancers on the slab for a time and then lost interest. She turned to Willie and said: “What did he say your name was?”

  “Wilton England.”

  “Wilton …?”

  “Wilton Jubal England, matter of fact.”

  “I thought he called you Willie.”

  “Guess he did.”

  “Willie England?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh!”

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re the one with the newspaper,” the girl said.

  “That’s right,” Willie said. “You read it?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You shouldn’t bother.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a bore,” Willie said. “It’s like a prayer meeting.”

  “I don’t think it’s so bad,” the girl said.

  “I’m worn out from editing those awful ambivalent essays the faculty members send me. About the human situation and all. Even worse is having to read my own copy. Proofs. And corrected proofs. And corrections of corrected proofs. We’ve got lousy printers, but they’re sincere liberals.”

  The girl smiled and said: “Feel better now?”

  “No,” Willie said. “You like teaching?”

  “It’s all right. “I’m on a fellowship — working on my master’s.”

  “I’ll bet you’re brilliant,” Willie said. “I can tell about these things.”

  “I was Phi Beta Kappa,” the girl said. “Would you believe it?”

  “Sure.”

  “But an absolute cultural vacuum. I really don’t know anything. All I do is memorize … You want something from memory?” She did not wait for Willie’s reply but started right in:

  Come let us mock at the great

  That had such burdens on the mind

  And toiled so hard and late

  To leave some monument behind,

  Nor thought of the levelling wind.

  Come let us mock at the wise;

  With all those calendars whereon

  They fixed old aching eyes,

  They never saw how seasons run,

  And now but gape at the sun.

  Come let us mock at the good …

  “And so on … See? That’s Yeats.”

  She had spoken the lines without expression, running them past, uninspired, one behind the other like passing freight cars. She smiled brightly. Willie murmured approval. Harris returned to the table with George Giffen trailing him. Giffen sat next to them, his face twitching.

  “Hey, you hear about Rinemiller, Willie?” he said.

  Willie said, no, he hadn’t heard.

  “Rinemiller’s runnin’ for the Speakership. Takin’ pledges already. I just pledged him my vote.”

  “That’s real good,” Willie said.

  “You know what I think about all the time?” the girl said.

  “What?” Willie said.

  “Rinemiller make one hell of a good House Speaker,” Giffen said. “Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes,” Harris said.

  “Sports cars,” Cathryn said to Willie. “I sit around grading themes in my office and my mind’s not on comma blunders or run-on sentences at all. I have little fantasies about riding around town in a red roadster with my hair flying, looking chic and adorable …”

  “Like in the magazine pictures,” Willie said.

  “Yes,” the girl said.

  “You say you got a roadster?” Giffen said.

  “No,” Cathryn said. “I say I want one.”

  “I got a new Alfa,” Giffen said. “You want a ride in it?”

  “Harris is my date, George,” Cathryn said. “But I suddenly find you irresistible.”

&n
bsp; “Go ahead,” Harris said, gripping himself. “I’m willing to make any reasonable sacrifice to get Giffen away from this end of the table.”

  “Come on … Come on …” Giffen was saying. He stood behind the girl and held her chair. She finally got to her feet. Giffen put his arm around her and kissed her neck. “Hey!” he said to her. “We’re good friends, hah?”

  “Can I drive it?” she said to Giffen. She looked around uncertainly at her date. Harris continued to concentrate on conversations at the other end of the table.

  “I’ll check you out on it,” Giffen said. “It’s Italian. You can’t beat foreigners for workmanship. It goes like a bomb …”

  Cathryn and Giffen moved off toward the parking lot. After a few moments, Harris rose and moved down to the other end of the table. Willie sat alone, thinking about money.

  There was an argument underway at the opposite end. Rinemiller, Huggins, and some of the others had ambushed a state senator who had been drinking with friends on the inside. It was like a gang war — someone from the enemy camp had wandered onto alien ground, and they were giving him a terrible time. Willie could hear most of it from where he was sitting. The older man was flushed in the face. He held on to his glass of beer and looked off into the trees. “You want a Soviet America?” he kept saying.

  Ellen Streeter came round from the other end. “Hello, Harris doll,” she said. She looked at Willie. “You left me,” she said.

  “It’s not true — quit demagoguing,” Willie said. “You just got taken over by a mob of admirers. One of them took my chair.”

  Ellen Streeter smiled and touched his hand. He wondered if he ought to start dating her again. It was like high school, when boys and girls had crushes on each other from one semester to the next. Except that now the subject of his secret desire had developed faint wrinkles round her nice neck.

  “Who’s your girl?” she said to Harris.

  “Teacher at the college.”

  “She has nice legs,” Ellen said. “You don’t see good horsy legs like that any more.”

  “Don’t be unkind,” Willie said. “You don’t need to.”