Gay Place

by Billy Lee Brammer

  “Where were you?”

  “Outside — fumbling with my date and my door keys.”

  “Let’s get married. It’s time we got married.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s time, and I love you.”

  “You don’t really.”

  “Hell yes I do.”

  “Say it again.”

  “Hell yes I do.”

  “The other …”

  “I love you.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Sure it is. So let’s get married.”

  “No.”

  “Then live in sin with me. I can afford maybe a week of really high type sin. I’m solvent. I’ve got $500. Collected the night before election by Stanley and John Tom. I never got around to spending it.”

  “Sounds like dirty money.”

  “That’s the only kind there is, honey. You know that. I’ll take you to Mexico for a week.”

  “No. That’s passed. That offer, as they say, was limited. You never delivered me there on time.”

  “I was up for office, honey. I was campaigning.”

  “Did you win?”

  “Hell yes I won … Don’t you read the papers?”

  “There’s no delivery out here, love. But I knew you’d call. Can you come out this weekend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I need rescuing. There’s been a party every night. Pre-debutante parties. I’ve got to withdraw — absolutely the last group of young ladies I’m presenting to the ravages of society. Got to withdraw from this glittering world and all these faceless figures in white ties … You like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s hard on one’s perspective spending night after night eating caviar and drinking twenty-five-year-old Ambassador.”

  “I know it is, honey. It’s awful. That’s why I don’t go to debutante launchings any more. I promised myself.”

  “Will you come this weekend, then? There’s a party this weekend.”

  “I’ll try like hell, honey. I’ll sure try. You’ve got the right idea. It’s best to ease off these things gradually … What’s the party?”

  “Artist types. Or entertaining the artist types. It’s a society we’ve organized. We encourage the muse.”

  “I’m only coming to get married …”

  “It’ll be a nice party. Martinis served up lukewarm in milk bottles. They’re all a pack of primitives. Neanderthals. Flanked by hairy-faced women.”

  “Why don’t you come here.”

  “You’ve got to come. I’ve got a date I can’t get out of.”

  “That’s wonderful. You think the three of us will get along?”

  “You don’t understand. I’ve got a date, but he won’t last the evening. He’s a heavy drinker and he always passes out early. Then you’ll be my date.”

  “That sounds awfully tenuous.”

  “You can count on it. I’ve never seen it fail. He collapses before ten. He’s very unhappy. He works in the family store, but he wanted to study medicine or play the violin or something …”

  The party was as she described it. The sad young man was unconscious before ten o’clock; the martinis were warm and the guests were a combination of extremes — fine-limbed young people and seedy throwbacks to bohemia. The paintings were hung about like great prime slabs of beef. He moved alongside Andrea from room to room, shaking hands. She introduced him to everyone as her “Representative-Elect.” “This is my Representative-Elect,” she would say, like the queen and the prime minister. The guests smiled and nodded as if he were in the bond business or was perhaps her desperate young man who wanted to play the violin. The talk was mostly about Truman and Toynbee and Kenton, ranchstyle houses and draft laws and Howard Hughes. Those who could afford it were planning vacations in quaint, clapboard artist colonies, and those who couldn’t were already resigned to the endless weeks of working over window displays in local department stores.

  Later, she had turned to him and asked if he disapproved.

  He remembered saying yes, absolutely yes; that he would be willing to start a subscription campaign just to finance a special, chartered one-way flight to Provincetown. For all the others. With the understanding they wouldn’t be coming back. He made an outlandish gesture: “You don’t give a damn for all the oppressed peoples of the world.”

  “Who are all these oppressed peoples?” she said.

  “Millions all over. Me … right here. I’m oppressed. I want to take you off to some quiet glade and make love and talk about the success of the Berlin airlift, and this party oppresses all that.”

  She smiled at him. “Get my bag and we’ll find this place.”

  Outside he had said: “I don’t know any glades.”

  They sat in the car, holding on to each other with the trifling medleys of some hotel dance orchestra coming from the radio. There was a period of interminable kissing during which she had got her hand inside his shirt and he was able to push the top of her dress down and touch her small breasts. He remembered the spectacular contrast of dark and light skin. Then she had sat up, touching her hair, and said: “It’s too bad.”

  “About what?”

  “About that glade. Now there’s no place to go but home, and my folks aren’t here this weekend and it’ll be such a disappointment you won’t get to see them …”

  She had taken his hand and led him across the concrete walk between banana trees and eucalyptus plants and the Mexican tile floor in the living room and directly up the carpeted stair into a small, girl-smelling bedroom with a view of the garden and a gone-dry creek. She kissed him once, briefly, almost tragically, and began to undress. Next to him in the bed she was trembling violently, but in a moment she was giggling in his ear. “I’ve read the books,” she said, “yet I can’t remember any of it. Will you tell me what to do …” Later, still smiling with her face next to his, she laughed about not being able to say the right things. “The trouble is I really do feel different … I ache all over …” And still later, when they had slept in each other’s arms for a time, she sat up in the bed, looking like a little girl roused from an afternoon nap. “Don’t stop saying it now,” she said. “This is absolutely the Wrong Time to stop saying it.”

  “Saying what?”

  “That you want to get married.”

  “I want to get married,” he said, but she had not heard any of it; not even her own question: she was asleep in his arms again almost immediately.

  Sitting on the soft leather cushions in the cramped space of the roadster, listening to the young men’s voices from across the campus, he was able, finally, to realize his loss, to feel the great gap in himself. Not so much long gone youth as adulthood never quite attained. For all his good intentions, there had been only a kind of chic faithlessness in between, randy and frivolous. If there had once been beauty … a fever for life and a search for a code of conduct, those private joys had long since been supplanted by trivial and lighthearted depravities.

  He started the engine of the little car. Stanley, sleeping next to him, held on to his glass of whiskey but did not come awake. They bounced across the football field and steered the car toward the commercial district, past darkened dormitories and gray buildings and faintly lit chapels. Moving into the center of the city he smoked the last of his cigarettes and thought about their deeply violated selves.

  Eight

  SHE WAS AWAKE, SUDDENLY, in the middle of the night, conscious of where she was and remembering why. It was not such a horror as she expected. Merciful oblivion had eluded her, but sleep brought on a condition in which she could at least attempt some kind of coming to terms. It was a curious thing, a small thing — vast hopelessness might descend again by morning, but at that moment in the middle of the night, lying in the strange room, the covers bunched up round her legs and the wet-sheep smell of mattress ticking filling her head, she could look back on the evening and see where she had been. It was not pretty to watch, but there was no compulsion to t
urn and run. The way she had on the day before when she had seen the small dog, very much like their own but of no particular distinction otherwise, stand trembling and terrified as an absurd, high-fendered Model-A Ford bore down. It was such a comic scene, and so protracted — the old car advancing on the dog, and the dog so clumsy and struggling like an ancient water bird grown too large in evolution for flight — that it did not seem any harm could come of it. Even at the moment when the dog ducked under the front bumper only to raise its head again and strike out at the machine passing over, and the next second with the dog tumbling along beneath the car, fighting back, furious and uncomprehending — she could not believe any violence had been visited. It was all so ridiculous and … slow motion. It was not until the dog was released from the infernal thing, dazed and bleeding and staggering toward her, gaining strength and screaming horribly and snapping at its tortured loins, that she was able to grasp what had happened and move herself toward the animal. When she reached it, remembering all the warnings from her girlhood about keeping her distance, the dog was stretched out on the sidewalk, stiff and unmoving and open-eyed. Then she had turned and run; only a few quick clumsy steps, staggering in the high heels, but it seemed she had covered half the block before she turned to look again as the old woman driver of the Model-A stood on the running board and stared from the other end of the street. Then she had walked on, steadying herself, not even breathing hard.

  So now she could look back at this last accident earlier in the evening. Perhaps she could retrace her steps and try to help or at least make a prayer as the two of them expired, gasping for air.

  Neil would be asking the same question. Or had he even heard the wild cry in the night? Was it all in her mind — some passioned whoop advancing out of the dark fields, ringing inside her head? Perhaps it was she, tipsy all evening and half incoherent in his arms. It doesn’t matter — Andy, my friend, you mind not mattering? My mind over matter. Irrelevant is what it is — but so awfully damned relevant is what I am and whether the signal came out of me loud and clear. Look Neil honey you just don’t pay any attention to those sound effects … But he heard, I know he heard, and he’s always been inclined to take things so serious. Oh goddam the both of us, why can’t we keep the faith? Alas a trembling takes me … Who said that? Who got taken by all that trembling? John Tom and his inevitable seizures: the Abominable Bookman. The both of us, shaking all over. He kept his faith one way or another. What were the lines …? If ever any beauty … No. That was Neil. Sweet dear Neil and our dear sweet love for one another. Like eating one’s young. If ever any beauty I did see, which I desir’d and got, ’twas but a dream of thee … Was there ever a love, either too much or too little, that wasn’t corrupted by sentiment? And possession? It would have to be mystical. Or worse, a mere benignancy. Philanthropists! Why can’t you charitable souls leave me alone — the both of you — and try to do it the right way for a change. By not overdoing it, I mean. I wanted some privacy and the two of you went and overdid it. I remember being wonderfully serene and self-contained at first … but then there was so much to tell about later and you’d both gone over the hill. I told some others. Or tried to tell them as best I could, struck dumb and inarticulate, using the sign language one of you Eagle Scouts had taught me years before. I wonder if they got the message? Any of them … Any of the messages. I thought the visiting fireman had, that actor, the aging matinee idol with the changing accents: Oxford and Beacon Hill and the Virginia horse country. But he didn’t get the message. I thought he had. I got his all right. Quite the most strenuous good time I’ve had in years … My manhood stands in salute! Smutty postcards. He missed the point entirely. I ought to tell Neil now. He might listen, the way he was in that ancient vale miles and miles ago when I hadn’t really much to say. I could tell him now, I think I could, I’d do my best, I’ll go to him now and try …

  She pulled herself from the bed and slipped on the gown she had dropped in her flight down the hall. She walked barefoot and shaking into the other room. There was only the empty bed; the sheets weren’t even warm. How quickly these enthusiasms cool and expire! She inspected all the ground-floor rooms and finally looked out the front door and saw that the roadster was gone …

  Later, in the guest bed, she lay quietly waiting for sleep, waiting and coming wider and wider awake. She thought about a tranquilizer, but then reminded herself that the effect was cumulative, building up over the days, and that the condition it brought on was not so much blessedness as a mere sapping up of nervous energy. She took three aspirin instead and lay there waiting for them to work inside her. In the last stages, just before sleep, she was dimly aware of Neil’s footsteps in the hall, but she could not get the words formed on her lips to call out, and she had nearly forgotten what it was she had to tell.

  He did not undress, but loosened a button and half unzipped the fly on his Bermuda shorts before lowering himself onto the bed. He did not think much about her; those few thoughts that came through were muddled and confused by the re-creation of emotion, or what remained of emotion, of the gorgeous feeling evoked from his ruminations on the intramural field. What was it he had lost? Beauty, or the illusion of beauty, or the illusion of loss. Real or imagined — that was of no importance. What counted most was the sense of loss, a value collapsed or in imminent danger of collapse. Those decaying timbers underneath. How had he let it happen?

  He ought not be a politician, he told himself. Nice line of work but requiring a vision … a dedication, a certainty of belief in what one is doing. He’d had it once; the trouble was, all those sturdy affirmations began to dissolve. Right before the eyes … Front of my eyes? Perhaps a little left of center. You’d had it once, I do believe you did, but you just stopped believing … Stopped it altogether …

  I remember once oh boy you had it, as singleminded and certain and unremittingly earnest as the best of them. Those old pols. That the way the old pol pounces? Old pols! Why is it we have to be so all-fired sure of ourselves? Or at least make like. How come I got the thing dumped on me just now of all times, of all ages, my spiritual prepubescence, when those wondrous self-righteous juices have temporarily ceased pulsing, or gone to vinegar, and I stand here waiting for wisdom or meaning or sweet bliss? They got me at this difficult age — too old and whiskery for playclothes and not yet grown tall enough for cufflinks and striped pants. I lost that vision, that monumental sustaining self-assurance. Just the illusion would be a comfort — perhaps that’s what old Arthur Fenstemaker’s got himself so high on. The real or the imagined, he’s got it, got hold of it good, they all have, all the great ones, like Stanley says, pushed along by that vision, like artists. But those artists are indulged and almost encouraged in their weakness. Because they got the poetic vision. What the hell! They got a different kind? They hold a monopoly or something? Picture an old pol revealing his frailty. Unthinkable. No prayer-meeting confessions please. Get up there like a man and tell ’em how it is you got the cure for all those ills …

  If I could just see this script old Stanley wrote …

  Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll bear with me a moment — ten years or so would do nicely — while I grope around in the shadows for a new fuse. Around here backstage. That great hot light in my head seems to have gone dark. Got a match? Perhaps I can scrounge around in these perfumed sheets till dawn and then I’ll set us back on course. Of course! The one my John Tom charted … I know it well, my friends, and him too, that happy navigator. Never a need to spit into the wind with him around. But who the devil got us into these latitudes in the dead of night? Man the boats!

  Those two fellows who knew the way seem to have perished at sea, in those sweet-smelling bedsheets … You see?

  There was this nice lady on board for a time, and she knew the way partly, but the women and children went first and there’s no telling where they’re drifted now. Who knows? If I could read that script I just might walk on the goddam water. I did it once before. That women and those childre
n might be just over the next swell … And of course and perhaps and in any event, all of us and any number of scripts should be visible in the first light of the dawn …

  Nine

  HE WAS AWAKENED BY the giggling of the little girls. They stood a few feet away, trying to control their laughter, delighted with the picture of him bunched up miserably in the sheets. The older one held his breakfast in a tray; the younger was laying out silver and an undersized tablecloth. He attempted to smile for them; it felt like an act of contrition.

  Their voices were not really coming through to him just yet; they were merely singsong sounds in the beginning. The older girl set the tray in his lap and fled downstairs for salt and pepper. The younger pulled herself onto the foot of the bed and sat watching him, enormously pleased.

  “This your mother’s idea?”

  “No. She’s asleep.”

  “Really?”

  “It was our idea. Emma helped, but it was our idea.”

  She was silent, watching him. Then she said: “Who do you love?”

  “Who do I love?”

  “Yes!”

  He had to think a moment. “You and your sister and … your mother … and Emma … and. I guess those people best of all.”

  She picked at her nose. He told her not to pick her nose.

  Then he said, “Who do you love?”

  Now she had to think. She yawned.

  “The sandman!” she said, smiling, surprised with herself.

  “The sandman? That’s —”

  “And the Easter rabbut and the fairies that bring valentines …”

  “Really? … What about Santa Claus?”

  “No! There isn’t any Santa Claus.” This was stated as incontrovertible fact.

  “Well … But there’s a sandman and a fairy and an Easter bunny?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well then you hold on to those few illusions …”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you love any people?”