Gay Place

by Billy Lee Brammer

  “Well how are the Christiansens — what about them?”

  Andrea looked up at him coolly. Her gaze was level and imperturbable; she did not have to ask what he was talking about.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally, “I just don’t know …” She was silent for a moment, and then: “… Are you happy? I’ve been very happy, very content these last few months …”

  “If not exactly continent,” he said.

  “What?”

  He made no reply.

  “I mean I’ve felt really serene for the first time in years,” she continued. “It’s a nice feeling, I can tell you. I do exactly what I want to do. Life is awfully well ordered. I don’t sit around wishing I were in Taos or Aspen or Cuernavaca. If I wanted to go I would go. But I don’t, you see. It’s like the alcoholic with the booze hidden in the commode. I can rest easy ’cause I know it’s there …” She laughed quietly to herself, as if looking inward. “I feel like a great happy bird.”

  “Well that sounds fine,” he said. He seemed to have found something fascinating on the label of the whiskey bottle.

  “Do you want a divorce?” she said.

  He continued to stare at the bottle. “I … don’t … think so,” he said.

  “I suppose it would rather bitch up your politics.”

  “Oh hell. It’s not that — it’s not that at all.” But now that he thought about it, it was — it certainly was.

  “Well … Like I said, I’m content. It’s entirely up to you.”

  “But god damn,” he said, “how long does this go on? Where does it end? Where does it lead to? It’s like working without pay. Is it just going to be an interminable blah?”

  “Is that how you feel?”

  “Well. I think I love you — or as if I’m teetering on some brink, half in and half out of love for you.”

  “Really?” She appeared to think this faintly amusing. “I don’t believe I feel anything. Anything at all. For you or anyone. I was just so tired, so God-awfully exhausted when you left … I’ve just been enjoying being alone … I feel saintly.”

  Now Neil was amused. He started to say something, but she continued to talk.

  “I think it would probably be a lot better for you … politically, at any rate, if we just let things ride. For appearances. Perhaps someday I might want a divorce — I might want to remarry. Who’s to say? I like things as they are. I’m happy.”

  “Appearances? I never knew you thought much about appearances.”

  “Well, there are the children to consider, and —”

  “Where’s the Skyliner? What is it — some motel?”

  She ground out her cigarette as if she were about to leave the room. But she stayed in the chair and looked at him. “What did you do — have the operator trace the goddam call?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “I wouldn’t — you’re right — I really wouldn’t.”

  They were silent, looking at each other.

  “Well what were you doing there?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said. She smiled. It seemed to satisfy nothing. Then she said: “God! Here it is again. You’ll never understand, but I was feeling so good until I knew you were in town. And now here it is again.”

  “You don’t feel any of this is a husband’s prerogative, then?”

  “What do you think you are?” she said. “A priest in the confession box? If I went around wondering what you’ve been up to while —”

  “You wouldn’t believe me, etcetera,” he said.

  They fell silent for a time, like half-primed athletes, breathing lightly.

  “Oh Jesus …”

  “You’re right. Oh Jesus. And I felt so good all day.” She left her cigarette in the ashtray and got slowly to her feet. “I’m going to bed …”

  “Where shall I sleep?” he said.

  “With me if you like … I don’t care … If you’d rather not you’ll have to get some linens out for the other bedroom.”

  He stood and looked around. He pulled the glass doors shut and switched off the phonograph. After a moment, he got his bag from the hall and followed her up the stairs. He undressed and hung up his two suits. Andrea was in the bathroom. He moved on down the hall, looked in on the bare cubicle reserved for guests. A few feet beyond he could hear the children breathing softly in their sleep. He checked their covers and returned to the main bedroom. Andrea was slipping out of her clothes; she was silhouetted against the french doors — there was a false balcony leading off — and she was uncompromisingly lovely in the soft light.

  “Damn!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I … can’t … get out of this thing.”

  “When did you start wearing girdles?” He moved up behind her and began unfastening hooks.

  “It’s the clothes this year … You have to.”

  When she was out of it, she continued to stand there, looking out through the doors and across the narrow balcony, her back still turned to him. He could see her bare shoulders begin to tremble, and when she finally moved to face him tears were running down her cheeks.

  “Oh, Neil, what’s happened …? How did all this happen …?”

  She was up against him, crying softly, “I don’t know … I don’t know …” He had his face next to hers; her hair brushed lightly over his eyes. He stood there holding her and wondering if he would ever know anything … They pulled the covers down to the foot of the bed and lay on the faintly perfumed sheets …

  “Ah Neil …”

  “Oh love …”

  “Oh God I love you, I really do …”

  “Ah …”

  “Ah that’s … it’s like … not being married …”

  For a moment they both seemed stunned; it was as if she had collapsed under him. Then she slipped sideways and was on her feet, sobbing, grabbing at the covers at the end of the bed. She vanished down the hall.

  For a long time afterwards he could hear her sniffling in the other room. He lay there in her bed, perspiring against the soft, sweet-smelling sheets. There was a place along his neck where she had dug her nails. When he could no longer hear her in the next room, he pulled himself from the bed and began to dress again.

  Outside, the moon suggested some hideous, oversized medicine ball. The wind moved through the rank foliage, and the houses across the street and on either side resembled cheap stage props. Andrea’s roadster was parked out front. He did not much like to drive the little car, but he did not want to bother with moving it out of the drive. He climbed in, stretching his legs, and got it started. The sound of the motor was awful; it screamed like a wounded animal all the way down the street …

  Six

  STANLEY HAD BEEN WORKING continuously since his arrival at the hotel in the afternoon. He had sat there, cushioned by foam rubber pillows in a hard-backed chair, for nearly eight hours — except for an interval of twenty minutes when he had gone down on the street to buy the early editions. And some cellophane-wrapped cookies and crackers (peanut butter in between). And a banana … several candy bars … a bottle of whiskey … and chocolate cupcakes. Along with a carton of strawberry-flavored soft drinks he identified as “Country Red.”

  Now the banana, the crackers, the cupcakes and cookies were gone. Consumed. A single candy bar remained. Two of the big red drinks had been drained much earlier in the evening. Soon after midnight he split the seal on the whiskey and began taking sips from the bottle. He had been working nearly continuously since sundown and the black-topped desk was littered with pencil stubs, wadded typescripts, sheets of onionskin and cheap bond, candy wrappers, looseleaf notes, and a fine spray of cigarette ash. He now began to fit his portable typewriter into its traveling case. To his right, at the foot of the bed, were the neat stacks of paper, the completed speech drafts. He stood and moved into the bathroom, returning in a moment with a sterilized glass wrapped in wax paper. He removed the paper and poured himself a drink fro
m the bottle.

  There was Mexican music coming in on the radio. Occasionally an announcer exhorted everyone listening to send him a check or money order in the amount of one dollar ninety-eight cents. A genuine gold-plated Ten Commandments charm bracelet would be immediately dispatched by return mail.

  Stanley lay on the bed, balancing the glass of whiskey on his thin chest. He kicked off his shoes and began massaging his eyes with the tips of his fingers. The fingers were stained with tobacco and his eyes burned worse than ever. He pulled himself up, set the drink on a night table, moved into the bathroom and washed his face. He looked at the radio, loosed an oath at the fellow selling charm bracelets, and began to undress. He stood in front of a full-length mirror staring at himself in his too-large underwear. He shook his head and sighed and began doing flexing exercises in front of the mirror.

  He was tall and spindly with a caved-in chest, and he had been doing the exercises since his first year in college when he and Neil and John Tom had lived together in the unrelieved heat of a decaying quonset hut. Neil and John Tom had stolen the quonset hut off government land, from an abandoned Army camp; transported it fifty miles in a borrowed flatbed truck and set up housekeeping like a pair of redneck squatters in a kind of servicemen’s hobo jungle in a woodsy trailer park a few blocks from the campus. They had charged Stanley twenty-five dollars a month for room and board, which gave him carte blanche on whatever decomposing wet-rot was made available in the icebox and alternate nights on the only mattress that was innerspring. He remembered the old icebox clearly — loudly and clearly: it was constantly dripping water into a shallow pan underneath. At least once an evening it was his responsibility to empty the pan. Each of them had his chores, John Tom would explain; everybody pitches in to help. Neil and John Tom called it the co-op.

  He lodged constant protests against the inequity of it all — at twenty-five dollars a month, for Chrissake, they ought to have been hovering round him with silken comforts and viands and enormous feather fans. But he could never bring himself to desert. It would have been the same as leaving some wonderfully ribald stag party just before the dancing girls came in.

  John Tom was the younger of the brothers; he was only two years older than Stanley and this helped span the gap between Stanley’s generation and Neil’s. The distance was enormous and not entirely a matter of age differentials. Neil was a war hero. He had begun in Stanley’s imagination to resemble a Terry Lee or a Captain Easy — some incredible soldier of fortune out of a comic-book world. He’d won not only the Air Medal and DFC as a fighter pilot, but a Silver Star and Purple Heart for infantry action. He had been shot down over Normandy, and instead of trying to get back to his base at Coventry, he had joined some footsoldiers and slogged into Paris carrying an M-1.

  The M-1 was still around the quonset hut that year for all of them to see. Sometimes they used it for a door prop; occasionally as a window stick. Most of the time it was pushed under one of the narrow bunk beds, gathering dust, but for a full month, he remembered, Neil went around polishing the gunstock and wetting the sights, threatening to shoot the first Nazi who walked through the splintered door. He had been trying to work himself into some kind of disability over the war — hoping he could get a monthly compensation from the Veterans Administration as a “spiritual casualty” — but the effort was unsuccessful. Even when Stanley and John Tom testified in his behalf.

  There wasn’t much else in the quonset hut: some beat-up furniture, a handmade bookshelf for the volumes Neil had never returned to the USO and Rec Room libraries, a few pen and ink drawings by John Tom and one enormous mural, streaked by water and dappled with mold, painted in the shower stall. And there were Neil’s old records — Chick Webb, Fletcher Henderson, Billie Holiday, a bunch of others — along with a windup victrola his parents had passed on to him when he entered the Air Corps. John Tom had an ancient LaSalle automobile. Neil occasionally rode around on an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

  And there were the barbells, of course. John Tom’s barbells. They were always around, going to rust. Sometimes John Tom would notice them on the floor and would pause reflectively for a moment, staring. Then he would spit on his hands and squat down as if he were about to hoist them in one clean, swift movement. … Then he would hesitate again, straighten up and turn away.

  “Come on, Stanley,” he would say. “Let’s get out front and do some calisthenics, some flexing exercises. Those iron things’ll give you the hernia.”

  Stanley had been standing in front of mirrors, doing the flexing exercises, since that first year in college, but it never seemed to bring about any noticeable difference in the way he looked, least of all the miraculous transformations touted by John Tom. But who could say what kind of wreck he might have become without them? He stood there now in front of the hotel room mirror, mashing his thin arms, perspiring slightly. He lay down on the bed again and remained motionless for a few minutes. Then he sat up, reached to the foot of the bed for the typescript, and examined his work.

  There was the one main speech — fourteen awful pages of it — along with an attached news release capsuling its contents so the lazy dumb bastard reporters would know what to say. If you didn’t take them by the hand and show them what it was all about, they would miss the point altogether. The other speech, an alternate, was shorter and vastly more appealing. He had told the robber barons in convention assembled just what sons of bitches they were. In a nice, oblique way, of course. But he felt sure they would grasp the point, the God’s truth of it. He had simply unloaded on them — explained how any notion of a tax cut was imbecilic in the extreme; made the obvious point that big government would just inevitably get bigger; appealed to their better natures (like a chicken bone stuck sideways in the windpipe would appeal!) to realize the absolute necessity for a relaxing of trade barriers. And so on.

  Looking over the typescript, Stanley realized this would be his definitive work. “I’ve never seen me looking better,” he said aloud. “A credit to old Daddy-Pop.” He would show the two speeches to Neil and then they would form a little circle, joining hands and chanting obscure market quotations, as bare-breasted native women moved in close to set fire to a trash pile in the center — old looseleaf notes, onionskin, the morning papers, banana peels, half-eaten candy bars, cellophane wrappers, grubby hand towels, and the wadded typescript of the second speech, his definitive work.

  Neil could use it if he decides not to run — and if he’s lost all interest in making a living at his law practice. They would call it the Stevenson-with-Hair speech.

  He smiled and lay back on the bed. Old Neil. Old Neil and old John Tom. He wished they were all back at that beach again, years ago. When the two brothers seemed to know. What was behind those gilt-edged rootbeer signs. All the answers to all the hard questions. You know? I didn’t know, he said to himself, but Neil and John Tom must have known. He supposed they had forgot. Ah! Some lines came to him … “For anyone alone and without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence, one must choose a master, God being out of style …”

  Well, he had set his heart on old Neil, his own Melbourne, but that fellow seemed to be passing out of fashion, too.

  He remembered the beach and the three of them (two of whom who knew) lying there watching Andrea and her friends parading across the sand with medicine balls and floats and beach umbrellas, thermos jugs and coolers and expensive-looking crystal in which they served up that awful sloe gin. They were friendly enough, Andrea and her friends, but there was a difference. The difference being that the others stood to inherit oil lands or 60-section ranches or stocks or property or family businesses of one kind or another. Even with his own little annuity, Stanley felt oddly resentful. More and more he had come to identify himself with his uncle’s half-cropper farm and the pretty cousin praying over that old cow.

  “I know one of those boys,” John Tom had said, looking up. “He comes from a very good nouveau riche family.” He had got to his fee
t and gone over to visit. Then the three of them had been invited for a drink. Old Neil just kept staring at Andrea, and he remembered her returning his gaze, keeping her eyes on him, lowering her lashes occasionally but then always looking up again, reaching for a pack of cigarettes or brushing the sunburnt hair out of her face. “Nobody tans like a rich girl, Stanley,” Neil had said. And then: “You’ve got to be honest about your limitations as well as your gifts … But what the hell?” He stood and brushed the sand off his blanket and headed toward the girl.

  They had not seen much of Neil for the remainder of the day, but it didn’t really matter. John Tom was half out of his mind and putting on a show for the others. He had just begun to paint seriously — and he was good — but he wasn’t so much driven by poetic vision as a truly lighthearted conception of life, a sense of vast pleasure and astonishment in what he could do with his hands. You couldn’t really say what kind of pictures he painted. All kinds. One day he would be splashing around in the manner of Jackson Pollack, and the next it was Pissarro with sunlight effects and small dabs of pigment and soft harmonies. Stanley remembered once, just after the Korean war started, he had visited John Tom in New York. John Tom had just completed a canvas, an awful thing, yellows and browns and dreadful olive greens, showing a peace dove being disemboweled by a slavering American soldier with a dollar sign for a shoulder patch. Stanley had looked at him helplessly, and John Tom explained that he needed money and that he knew a fellow who would probably pay him fifty dollars for the painting. “He goes around talking about Yankee imperialism all day long,” John Tom said.

  The afternoon at the beach John Tom had painted everything he could get to sit still for him. He ran up to the old LaSalle and came back with his oils and temperas. He painted beach balls and floats and umbrellas. He molded a figure out of sand and painted it in the uniform of one of the Queen’s Guards. He painted a woman’s breasts on one of the young men, and at a distance, in a certain light, they were lovely. He wanted desperately to paint a bathing suit on one of the girls. He vanished behind a dune with one of them for a length of time, but it never was established what exactly he might have painted on her.