Gay Place

by Billy Lee Brammer

  “Alfred … I’m already in bed. I’m sorry. Really. Perhaps we can talk this weekend at the ranch. Would you like that? You’ll come out, won’t you?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Rinemiller said. “Ranch.” He repeated it again — “ranch” — as if it were an insight into something. It was not until he rang off that he remembered everyone was coming to the ranch for the weekend. It wasn’t a country house rendezvous with Ouida after all.

  Still … he was able to tell himself there was some promise in what she’d said. She hadn’t hung up on him, hadn’t said No, Alfred, hell no and go way and quit buggin’ me. She was nice enough on the phone. He tried to remember what it was like when he had kissed her in the hotel room two years before, his hands touching her dressfront and Ouida gasping every time he pulled her hips against his. He lay back in the empty bed now, wondering about the Fieldings. There was record music coming from the front rooms. Fats Domino sang it to him …

  Ah’m gonna be uh wheel someday

  Ah’m gonna be some bah-dy

  Ah’m gonna be uh real gone cat

  ’N then Ah woan wahn yew …

  Willie’s phonograph droned on in the second story loft. Willie sipped wine from a peanut-butter glass and watched the girl, who sat cross-legged, like a small boy, on one of the work tables. She was slim and small-boned, neck and arms like flower stems; yet oddly voluptuous, full-breasted and going heavy in the hips, like a dancer who had never quite taken her work seriously. Her clothes were a puzzle too; she exuded a kind of chic provincialism, and he considered the conflicting images: Cathryn visiting smart little dress shops, looking for something a bit different; Cathryn bending down on her knees in a glum college dormitory, tracing off a fifty-cent dress pattern. He couldn’t determine which it was with her, and now that he’d asked, he was afraid he might have said the wrong thing.

  “I had no business,” he said, hesitating, searching for the right words.

  “Why not?” she said. “I wish I were a debutante. The truth is, my father’s a traffic cop. He has to renew a note every year at the bank to send me spending money.”

  “Still,” Willie said. “I had no business making smart cracks.”

  He had taken a good look at her and suggested that she was either very rich or very poor — that she was definitely not middle class.

  “I was thinking tonight how long it’s been since I carried on a normal conversation with anyone,” Willie said. “Without talking in the secret code. You know what I mean? I can’t remember the last time I carried on a really dull conversation — I mean commonplace stuff. The weather, neighbors, family. Realism. Paddy Chayefsky. You know?”

  She nodded her head. Her sweet laughter filled the big room.

  “Anyhow,” he said, “I’m glad you’re not a rich girl.”

  “I’m not glad about it,” Cathryn said. “Why should it please you?”

  “It’s easier,” Willie said. “It’s easier on my tender jazz-age psyche: I get a terrible case of the nostalgia in the evenings. I have this thing about girls I like. I’ve got to know all about them — everything. I’ll want to see your yearbook pictures and old love letters and photographs when you were coming to puberty and who it was first kissed you. And whether you were in the senior play. All that stuff. I always want to live it over again with the girl and feel poignant because I wasn’t there. Wasn’t there to see how pretty you were when you were thirteen, for example.”

  “I was terrible at thirteen,” Cathryn said.

  “It’ll be easier with you,” Willie said. “Not as much fun; I mean not as poignant — no real pathos — but I won’t be agonized about it. With rich girls it’s different. Their young girlhood is about as remote to my experience as playing stickball on the streets of New York. My father was a salesman for the National Biscuit Company. Growing up was bloody dull. So I sit around wishing I had been sent off to dancing school when I was twelve; sorry because my family never vacationed in the same resort town year after year — you know? The way it is in resort towns when you see the same good families reappearing every season? I hitched East on vacation few years ago, and it had a terrible depressing effect on me. Just looking at all those damn prep schools stuck away in the hills. I visited Cambridge and lay alongside the river and looked at those crazy spires at Harvard. I was melancholy for a week. Damn near ruined me …” He looked at the girl and grinned. “See? I make one hell of a revolutionary.”

  Cathryn slipped off her sandals and pulled her bare feet up on the worktable. “Fascinating,” she said. “I never had this problem.”

  “It’s this new social mobility,” Willie said. “Damned lousy democratic way of life. And it’s worse down here where there aren’t many really old and good families left. What we’ve got is new money; status hasn’t solidified. You like that? You can move up — or at least drift in and out. It’s bad enough having to come to terms with the money itself … Very conspicuous consumption … You become acquisitive; you want things. But even then it’s not enough. You end up wanting the impossible things — like a new childhood.”

  “All I want,” the girl said, “is a red M.G.”

  “No unhappy thoughts about your misspent youth?”

  “In my youth I wanted a red M.G.”

  “You’ll get it,” Willie said. “You’re bound to.”

  “I’ll end up a schoolteacher driving a five-year-old business coupe!”

  “Maybe it’s because of my age,” Willie said.

  “What is?”

  “All this wishing I’d gone to summer camp and attended Choate School and Harvard and married a girl from one of those junior colleges you never heard of. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old. Because I’m thirty.

  “You don’t look thirty.”

  “Only as young as you feel,” Willie said. “I feel thirty. And shallow and superficial and defeated. Compromised. No more revolutions. I missed all that, too. I need an enthusiasm. I feel about ready to sell out. Except nobody would buy me off …”

  “Good heavens!”

  “I don’t ordinarily groan this way,” Willie said.

  “Reading that paper of yours I thought you were irrevocably committed to the class war,” the girl said.

  “I want a red M.G.,” Willie said.

  Roy Sherwood lay across the bed, propped on his elbows, smoking a cigarette. Through the open window, from a great distance, he could hear the college towers clanging the half-hour. Only he hadn’t any notion what hour. One or two or three in the morning — it was all fuzzy in his head — and it was not that he wished so much for sleep now as simple, primitive release. Escape of any sort. Willie was right, he decided. My life, my wonderful, uneventful, irresponsible well-ordered life, is suddenly become complicated. He looked out through the window, marveling over the moonlight that seemed more spectacular than a noonday sun. I only want, he said to himself, to be left alone. Damn their souls — all of them — Ouida, Earle, Ellen, old Fenstemaker, Willie, even. Were they all out there, lurking in the shadows, ready to sandbag him with ambitions? He sniffed the gardenia bush through the window and rolled over on his back. He wondered if Earle Fielding really was outside, waiting for his next move, looking for the lights to dim.

  Ouida came down the hall and sat on the bed. She smoked his cigarette.

  “I hope that wasn’t Earle who called,” Roy said.

  “No,” Ouida said. “It was Alfred. I can’t imagine why, either. Have I ever given Alfred any reason to think …?”

  “Nobody gives Rinemiller any reason to think,” Roy said. “He does it all by himself. What’d he want at this hour?”

  “To come out here. To see me. Just the two of us. He wanted to talk. Just the two of us … He kept saying that … I can’t imagine …”

  “Keep away from him,” Roy said. “He’s up to no good.”

  “Oh?” She lay alongside him and kissed his face. “What are you up to?”

  “Good,” Roy said. “Good works. I’m the world’s great
est lawyer, politician and Zen archer, and I’m up to true and good and beautiful works.”

  They lay on the bed in the back room with only light showing from the kitchen and dining area. There was a faucet dripping somewhere, and occasionally the Fielding boy loosed a sad complaint in his sleep. They traded the cigarette back and forth and Roy fretted with the radio. In a few minutes, he thought, he either would or wouldn’t make love to Ouida, and however it went, whatever success they might have, there was no release in sight. Life had become intolerably complicated in a few short weeks, and he wondered if this was what he had been unconsciously working toward all along. Avoiding any positive steps, one automatically narrowed alternatives. Resisting commitment of any kind, one was exposed to pitchmen of every sort. A pox on the irresolute! He’d get Willie to write it up, newsmagazine style: As it must to all men, the awful weight of responsibility came to State Rep. Roy Sherwood one day last week …

  He wondered how long it would be before his father or uncle or older brother called, wanting to know what in hell all this talk was about his being censured. Who’s this married woman youah carryin’ on wif, boy? You can’t behave, we send Cousin Sammie up theah take you place and brang you back fah to practice the law. Lahk you should be, anyhow.

  At breakfast that morning Fenstemaker had thought it a great joke. Roy considered Fenstemaker a moment, deciding he was either a dirty old man or the world’s second greatest lawyer, politician and Zen archer. The Governor had tugged on his big nose, sitting there at breakfast in the Mansion, and said, “You good boy, Roy, but that ain’t good nuff. Up in Washington right now, in the Statler, they already made the beds and swept the rooms — and ev’body’s out runnin’ round makin’ history. Lots of history been made on top of a woman, but you ain’t gonna make it that way. Not just yet, anyhow …”

  Ouida sat up and snuffed out the cigarette. “I’m going to undress,” she said.

  “Wish you wouldn’t,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll make things awfully difficult.”

  “You’re a dud, you know that?” she said. “I thought we were all set to change the rules.”

  “It’s just … Well, Earle’s in town. Rinemiller’s calling you on the phone. Your boy down the hall here, he’s whooping in his sleep. It’s an unwholesome environment …”

  She held on to his hand and he began to speak again: “… I’m basically a poet, fundamentally a poet … Shy, sensitive, communicating on several levels of consciousness. Ambivalent is what I am …”

  “All right,” Ouida said, smiling. “I’ll wake the sitter. We’ll go somewhere else. Where shall we go?”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. He lay there thinking.

  “What about your house?”

  “My cat’s there,” Roy said. “Name of Sam Luchow. A shy, sensitive basically ambivalent cat. I wouldn’t want to give Sam Luchow the trauma. He’s anxious enough as it is …”

  Theories spun round in his head, schoolboyish and implausibly proper, vaguely Freudian. What he wanted, actually, was not to have Ouida. Would he have preferred to wander on out the front door and spend the next year rooting in his own bedcovers, pawing the ground, moaning about his unrequited love? It could not be entirely that. He did not want to get himself hopelessly involved with a girl he cared far too much about. Carnality had been such a tyrannizing factor between them from the beginning that he felt some effort ought to be made to establish another set of values before embarking on the obvious.

  But then she pulled open her dressfront and lay against him, and his last uneasy conviction flailed the air and died. Her skin smelled wonderfully good, and they had some lighthearted beginnings.

  Later, he pulled himself from bed and, partly dressed, bent down to kiss her fluttering heart. But she would not let him leave, coming awake in his arms and beginning to cry, and it was dawn before he got out of the house. He paced off the distance to the car and was just stepping inside when Earle Fielding grabbed him, whirled him around, and clipped him lightly on the chin.

  The motion was all so smooth and effortless, so lacking in violence, that Roy could only sit on the damp grass and smile, looking about the neighborhood, watching the weird morning light touch the tops of houses. From a railroad siding miles away a single switch engine thudded against a boxcar. The lawn’s moisture was coming through the seat of his trousers. He touched his jaw and attempted to look serious.

  Earle stood above him, embarrassed. On stage. His movements were oddly wooden as he circled warily. Finally he bent down and extended a hand.

  “Aw hell, Roy,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Roy looked up at him, still serious.

  “You want a sonofabitch,” he said, “I’ll be your sonofabitch, Earle.”

  Fielding began backing off and waving his hand. “Naw,” he was saying. “Jesus … forget it …”

  Half a block down the damp street, the engine in Rinemiller’s car exploded like a cannon in the stillness of the dawn. Roy sat back down on the grass and watched Earle and the auto vanish over a hill.

  Seven

  FENSTEMAKER ROUSED HIM AT eight with awful exhortations, a compound of biblical wisdom and Hill Country homily. Roy groaned and looked out through the window at the quiet surface of the lake, wondering about the hour. There were no fishermen in sight, nor had the water-skiing contingent from the college arrived.

  “Jesus …” Roy said. “What’s the time?”

  “How long, America, O how long,” Fenstemaker was babbling.

  Roy turned round the face of his clock, blinked in the harsh morning light and groaned again. Fenstemaker badgered him mercilessly. Roy protested: “I’m a sick man, Governor … I had three hours sleep night before last; I gave blood yesterday; I got in late again last night … this morning … I’m getting a nervous tic …”

  “You get over here in an hour?” Fenstemaker said. “I got somethin’ important … How soon you get over here?”

  Roy said he would come as soon as he had strength enough to shave and dress. “I’m sick, Governor,” he said. “I got the neurosis.”

  “You tie your shoelaces?” Fenstemaker said.

  Roy said maybe he could.

  “You’re all right, then,” Fenstemaker said. “Psychiatrist friend mine says man’s not really disabled emotionally till he gets up in the mornin’ and can’t decide which shoe to pull on first …”

  Roy gave assurances he would get to the Capitol sometime before noon.

  “Bring your friend,” the Governor said.

  “Who’s that?” Roy said. For a terrible moment he thought the Governor was going to start in on the business with Ouida.

  “That Willie,” Fenstemaker said. “Bring that Willie person. I got somethin’ for the both of you.”

  Then the Governor rang off with characteristic abruptness. Roy got slowly to his feet, washed, shaved, fed his cat, and ate a bowl of cereal. He tore off the cereal boxtop for the Fielding boy and listened unhappily for a moment to the sounds of fun and games commencing on the lake.

  Willie’s offices were in a semi-abandoned building several blocks from the college. It was a large frame structure put together during the war to house Navy V-12 personnel. There was good reason to doubt whether it could ever again survive another national emergency, but efforts were being made from time to time, very much in the manner that building construction progressed in Mexican towns, to restore it for use as office space. A new stone veneer rose halfway up the front; window screens were being repainted and striped linoleum laid along the first-floor hallway. Brightly colored asbestos paneling was used to partition off the ground-floor rooms. There was no way to reach the second floor from inside: only half a stairway hung from its fractured supports, leading up to nowhere. Willie’s guests had to climb the fire escape outside.

  Willie worked alone in the unimproved quarters upstairs. He had the whole upstairs — a space roughly the size of a basketball court — the dark floor littered
with waste paper, cheap newsprint, candy wrappers, beer cans, soft drink bottles, and numerous pasteboard boxes on which the word FILES had been drawn in black crayon. There were also three enormous, new and shining metal garbage cans. Willie had a single desk, a typewriter and stand, a makeshift worktable put together with sawhorses and thick plywood, an ancient wicker chair, a broken-down sofa, a clothestree, a leather ottoman, a fading, partially collapsed beach umbrella, a phonograph, and remnants of what appeared to be an army shelter half. A smell, an inexpressible something compounded of commercial detergents, sawdust, new paint and rat droppings, clung to all the upstairs.

  Willie had secured these offices through a rental agent friend, an ex-pipefitter who had not yet got over his uneasiness from deserting the labor movement. The agent had recommended the building to Willie’s sponsors, advising that work on the newspaper could be conducted in the upstairs space free of charge until such time as the newspaper became a moneymaking proposition or restoration of the upper half of the building was resumed. The likelihood of either seemed infinitely remote at this time.

  Roy climbed the fire escape and found Willie bent over his desk, talking with the young man from the college, Kermit’s friend, named Jobie. Roy sniffed the incredible air of the loft and said hello.

  Willie looked up, nodded, and went on talking to the boy. “You make some persuasive points …”

  “I know the prose is rather splendid,” Jobie said, “but the content — do you think it really says something to the common man?”

  “Yes … Yes …” Willie said, nodding, looking up at Roy for help. “I think it says a great deal.” Roy decided it was simply in Willie’s nature to be gentle on all occasions.

  “Is it true you have a large number of, uh, working class subscribers?”

  Willie nodded. He looked at the window for a moment, as if searching for the right words. “Yes …” he said. “The unions conducted subscription campaigns in all the locals.”