Family Dancing

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Family Dancing Page 17

by David Leavitt


  Celia swims to the pool ladder and hoists herself onto the deck. She has been in the water so long that her hands and feet have wrinkled and whitened. She wraps a towel around herself, suddenly ashamed of how her thighs bounce out of water, lies down on an empty chaise, and picks up a magazine called Army Slave from the patio table between her and Nathan. Andrew bought the magazine as a belated birthday present for Nathan, but neither of them has shown much interest in it this weekend. Now Celia thumbs through the pages—a man in green fatigues sitting on a bunk bed, clutching his groin; then a few shots of the man fornicating with another man, in officer’s garb. In the last pages, a third figure shows up, dressed in leather chaps, and looks on from the sidelines. “Do you like it?” Nathan asks. “Does it turn you on?”

  “I don’t understand what’s so erotic about army bases and locker rooms,” Celia says. “I mean, I suppose I understand that these are very male places. But still, they’re very anti-gay places. I mean, do you find this erotic? Did you find locker rooms erotic when you were growing up? And this guy in the leather—”

  Nathan thrusts out his hips and purses his lips. “Oh, don’t let’s talk about whips and leather. Let’s talk about Joan Crawford!” He makes little kissing gestures at Celia.

  “Be serious,” Celia says. “I was wondering because I want to know, to understand, genuinely.”

  “From a sociological perspective?” Nathan asks, returning to a normal posture.

  “You could call it that,” Celia says.

  “I’ll tell you this,” Nathan says. “When draft registration was reintroduced, I saw a magazine with a picture on the cover of it of this very big hairy guy in a torn-up army uniform, staring out at you very lewdly. And underneath him it said, ‘The Gay Community salutes the return of the military draft. ’ It was really very funny.”

  Celia’s eyes light up. “Oh, that’s great!” she says. “That’s reclamation!”

  Nathan doesn’t respond, so she returns to the magazine. She picks up a pencil from the table and starts to scribble something in the margin when Andrew appears, seemingly from nowhere, before her and Nathan. “I’m mad,” he says. “But I’m not going to play your stupid game and just run away and hide out and sulk. I want to face things.”

  “Andrew,” Nathan says, “explain to Celia why that magazine is a turn-on. Note I do not use the word ‘erotic.’ ”

  “Oh, Christ, Celia,” Andrew says, “I can’t talk about that with you.”

  “I should’ve figured you’d be prudish about things like this when I found out you slept in pajamas,” Celia says.

  “Andrew doesn’t want to spoil the integrity of his double life,” Nathan says. “He doesn’t want you to know that though by day he is your average preppie fashion-conscious fag, by night he goes wild—leather, cowboy hats, water sports. You name it, he’s into it.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Andrew says. “You’re the one with the double life.” He glances significantly at the pool.

  “This isn’t sociology. This isn’t objective curiosity,” Celia says. “You should know that by now.”

  They both look at her, puzzled. She closes her eyes. The sun beats down, and Celia imagines that the temperature has risen ten degrees in the last ten minutes. She opens her eyes again. Andrew has sat down on the end of Nathan’s chaise and is berating him.

  In a single, swift lunge, Celia pulls herself up and hurls herself into the water.

  Celia, Nathan, and Andrew have known each other since their freshman year in college, when they were all in the same introductory English class. For most of that year, however, Nathan and Andrew recognized each other only as “Celia’s other friend”; they had no relationship themselves. She recalls the slight nausea she experienced the day when she learned Nathan was gay. Up until that point, she had never known a homosexual, and she felt ashamed for having liked him, shyly as she did, so shyly that she phrased her feelings like that: “I like him,” she confided to her roommate, who played varsity hockey. Celia felt ashamed as well for not having known better, and she feared her naïve affection might seem like an insult to Nathan, and turn him against her. Nathan was something new to Celia; she idolized him because he had suffered for being different, and because his difference gave him access to whole realms of experience she knew nothing of. Celia had never had many friends in school, had never been terribly popular, and this had always seemed just to her: She was fat and shy, and she was constantly being reprimanded for being fat and shy. She never considered that she might be “different” in the intense, romantic way Nathan was. She was simply alone, and where Nathan’s aloneness was something that ennobled him, hers was something to regret.

  At first, Nathan accepted Celia’s gestures of affection toward him because she would listen—endlessly, it seemed—and talk to him, respond, as well. She was fascinated by the stories that he told her so willingly, stories about mysterious sexual encounters in men’s rooms, adolescent fumblings in changing rooms. Her curiosity grew; she read every book and article she could find on the subject of homosexuality, including explicit diaries of nights spent cruising the docks and beaches, the bars and bathhouses of New York and L.A. and Paris. She read all of Oscar Wilde, and most of Hart Crane. She started to speak up more, to interrupt in class, and found in her underused vocal cords her mother’s powerful, Bronx-born timbre, capable of instantly bringing crowds to attention. At their college, it was quite common for women in certain majors—women with long hair and purple clothes and a tendency to talk loudly and quickly and a lot—to spend most of their time in the company of gay men. Celia became the prime example of this accepted social role, so much so that some people started referring to her as the “litmus paper test,” and joking that one had only to introduce her to a man to determine his sexual preference. It was not a kind nickname, implying that somehow she drove them to it, but Celia bore it stoically, and worse nicknames as well. She joked that she was the forerunner of a new breed of women who emitted a strange pheromone which turned men gay, and would eventually lead to the end of the human race. All the time she believed herself to be better off for the company she kept. What Celia loved in her gay friends was their willingness to commit themselves to endless analytical talking. Over dinner, over coffee, late at night, they talked and talked, about their friends, their families, about books and movies, about “embodying sexual difference,” and always being able to recognize people in the closet. This willingness to talk was something no man Celia had ever known seemed to possess, and she valued it fiercely. Indeed, she could go on forever, all night, and invariably it would be Nathan who would finally drag himself off her flabby sofa and say, “Excuse me, Celia, it’s four a.m. I’ve got to get to bed.” After he left, she would lie awake for hours, unable to cease in her own mind the conversation which had finally exhausted him.

  As their friendship intensified, she wanted still to probe more deeply, to learn more about Nathan. She knew that he (and, later, Andrew) had a whole life which had nothing, could have nothing to do with her—a life she heard about only occasionally, when she was brave enough to ask (the subject embarrassed Nathan). This life took place primarily in bars—mysterious bastions of maleness which she imagined as being filled with yellow light creeping around dark corners, cigarettes with long fingers of ash always about to crumble, and behind every door, more lewdness, more sexuality, until finally, in her imagination, there was a last door, and behind it—here she drew a blank. She did not know. Of course Nathan scoffed at her when she begged him to take her to a bar. “They’re boring, Celia, totally banal,” he said. “You’d be disappointed the same way I was.” They were just out of college, and Nathan was easily bored by most things.

  A few weeks later Andrew arrived in the city. The night he got in he and Celia went to the Village for dinner, and as they walked down Greenwich Avenue she watched his eyes grow wide, and his head turn, as they passed through the cluster of leather-jacketed men sporting together in front of Uncle Charlie’s. Th
e next night he asked Celia to accompany him to another bar he was scared to go to alone (he’d never actually been to a gay bar), and she jumped at the opportunity. At the steel doors of the bar, which was located on a downtown side street, the bouncer looked her over and put out his arm to bar their entrance. “Sorry,” he said, “no women allowed”—pronouncing each syllable with dental precision, as if she were a child or a foreigner, someone who barely understood English. No women: There was the lure of the unknown, the unknowable. She could catch riffs of disco music from inside, and whiffs of a strange fragrance, like dirty socks, but slightly sweet. Here she was at the threshold of the world of the men she loved, and she was not being allowed in, because that world would fall apart, its whole structure of exclusive fantasy would be disrupted if she walked into it. “No women,” the bouncer said again, as if she hadn’t heard him. “It’s nothing personal, it’s just policy.”

  “When all the men you love can only love each other,” Celia would later tell people—a lot of people—“you can’t help but begin to wonder if there’s something wrong with being a woman. Even if it goes against every principle you hold, you can’t help but wonder.” That night she stood before those closed steel doors and shut her eyes and wished, the way a small child wishes, that she could be freed from her loose skirts, her make-up and jewels, her interfering breasts and buttocks. If she could only be stripped and pared, made sleek and svelte like Nathan and Andrew, then she might slip between those doors as easily as the men who hurried past her that night, their hands in their pockets; she might be freed of the rank and untrustworthy baggage of femininity. But all she could do was turn away. Andrew remained near the door. “Well,” he said. “Well, what?” Celia asked. “Would you mind terribly much if I went in myself, anyway?” he asked. She saw in his eyes that desperate, hounded look she recognized from the times they’d walked together, and passed good-looking men in the streets; that look she realized was probably on her face tonight as well. There was something behind those doors which was stronger than his love for her, much stronger. She didn’t say anything, but walked away into the street, vowing never to go downtown again. On the subway, riding home, she watched a bag lady endlessly and meticulously rearrange her few possessions, and she decided that she would become bitter and ironic, and talk about herself in witticisms, and live alone always. “For most young women,” she decided she’d say, “falling in love with a gay man was a rite of passage. For me it became a career.” Then she would take a puff—no, a drag—from her cigarette (she would of course have taken up smoking). And laugh. And toss it off.

  Celia has made Andrew and Nathan eggs, and garnished each plate with a sprig of watercress and a little tuft of alfalfa sprouts. Now, balancing the plates on her arm, she walks toward the library, where they’ve retreated from the sun for the afternoon. When she enters the library, she sees Andrew leaning against the windowsill, and Nathan lying with his legs slung over the leather sofa, his head resting on the floor.

  “Lunch,” Celia says.

  “Sundays are always horrible,” Andrew says. “No matter what. Especially Sundays in summer.”

  Nathan does a backflip off the sofa, and makes a loud groaning noise. “Such depression!” he says. “What to do, what to do. We could go tea dancing! That’s a lovely little Sunday afternoon tradition at the River Club. Thumping disco, live erotic dancers . . .”

  “I’m not going back to the city one more minute before I have to,” Celia says.

  “Yes,” Andrew says. “I’m sure Celia would just love it if we went off tea dancing.”

  Celia looks at him.

  “I’m surprised at you, Andrew,” Nathan says. “You usually enjoy dancing tremendously. You usually seem to have a really euphoric time dancing.”

  “Enough, Nathan,” Andrew says.

  “Yes, watching Andrew dance is like—it’s like—how to describe it? I think we see in Andrew’s dancing the complete realization of the mind-body dualism.”

  He stands up, walks around the sofa, and hoists himself over its back, resuming his upside-down position. “The body in abandon,” Nathan continues. “Total unself-consciousness. Nothing which has anything to do with thought.”

  Celia gives Nathan a glance of disapproval. It is unnecessary; Andrew is on the defensive himself today. “I find your hypocrisy laughable,” he says. “One minute you’re telling me, ‘Why don’t you just stop analyzing everything to death?’ and the next you’re accusing me of not thinking. Get your attacks straight, Nathan.”

  “Ah,” Nathan says, lifting up his head and cocking it (as best he can) at Andrew, “but I’m not criticizing your dancing, Andrew! I’m just extrapolating! Can you imagine what it would be like to never, ever think, really? I think it would be wonderful! You’d just sort of trip along, not particularly enjoying yourself but never having a bad time, either! Never feeling anguish or jealousy—too complicated, too tiring. I know people who are really like that. You see, Celia, Andrew thinks I’m dishonest. He thinks I run scared from the full implications of my sexual choice. He would like my friends, the Peters. Lovers, Celia. They’re both named Peter, and they live together, but they’re completely promiscuous, and if one has an affair, the other isn’t bothered. Peter just has to tell Peter all about it and it’s as if Peter’s had the affair, too. But they’re happy. They’ve fully integrated their gayness into their lives. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do, Andrew?”

  He hoists himself up, and sits down again on the sofa, this time normally.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Andrew says. “People like that aren’t even people.”

  Celia, sitting cross-legged on the floor, has finished her eggs. Now she reaches for Nathan’s plate and picks the watercress off it. Nathan has eaten only a few spoonfuls. At restaurants, Celia often finds herself picking food off other people’s plates, completely unintentionally, as if she’s lost control over her eating.

  Nathan, his head right side up, is humming the tune to the Pete Seeger song “Little Boxes.” Now he glances up at Celia. “Shall we sing, my dear?” he asks.

  “You can,” she says. “I don’t ever want to sing that song again.”

  Nathan sings:

  “Little faggots in the Village,

  And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky,

  Yes, they’re all made out of ticky-tacky,

  And they all look just the same.

  There’s a cowboy and a soldier and a UCLA wrest-i-ler,

  And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky,

  And they all look just the same.”

  Andrew bursts out laughing. “That’s funny,” he says. “When did you make that up?”

  “I made it up,” Celia says. “Walking down the street one night.” She smiles, rather bitterly, remembering the evening they walked arm in arm, very drunk, past Uncle Charlie’s Downtown and sang that song. Nathan suddenly became very self-conscious, very guilty, and pulled away from Celia. He had a sudden horror of being mistaken for half of a heterosexual couple, particularly here, in front of his favorite bar. “Just remember,” he had said to Celia. “I’m not your boyfriend.”

  “Why do I even speak to you?” Celia had answered. It was right after Andrew had abandoned her outside that other bar. That summer Andrew and Nathan, singly and collectively, stood her up at least fourteen times; twice Nathan, who was living at his parents’ place, asked to use her apartment to meet people and she let him. She didn’t think she was worth more than that. She was fat, and she was a litmus test. The only men she cared about were gay, and she didn’t seem to know many women. She was Typhoid Celia. But finally she got angry, one Sunday, when she was at Jones Beach with Andrew. “Answer me this,” she said to him, as they settled down on that stretch of the beach which is the nearly exclusive domain of Puerto Rican families. Andrew wasn’t even looking at her; he couldn’t keep his head from pulling to the left, straining to catch a glimpse of the gay part of the beach, where Celia had refused to sit. “Answer me this,�
� Celia said again, forcing him to look at her. “A nice hypothetical question along the lines of, would you rather be blind or deaf? Why is it that no matter how much you love your friends, the mere possibility of a one-night stand with someone you probably won’t ever see again is enough to make you stand them up, lock them out, pretend they don’t exist when you pass them in the street? Why do we always so willingly give up a beloved friend for any lover?”

  Even now she could see Andrew’s head drifting just slightly to the left. Then he looked at her, pointed a finger at her face, and said, “There’s a tea leaf lodged between your front teeth.”

  Celia doesn’t realize until she’s doing it that she is eating the last of the alfalfa sprouts off Andrew’s plate. In horror, she throws them down. She slaps her hand and swears she won’t do it again.

  “When are your parents getting back?” Andrew asks.

  “Not until tonight,” Nathan says. “They’re due in at seven.”

  “I spoke to my parents last week. They said they’d look for me in the TV coverage of the Pride March next week. It really touched me, that they’d say that. I didn’t even have to mention that there was going to be a Pride March, they already knew.”

  Silence from Nathan. Celia gathers her hands into fists.

  “Are you going to march this year, Nathan?”

  Nathan stands up and walks over to the stereo. “No,” he says. He puts a recording of Ravel on the turntable.

  “That’s too bad,” Andrew says.

  Celia considers screaming, insisting that they stop right here. Andrew knows that Nathan has never marched, will never march, in the annual Gay Pride Parade, ostensibly because he considers such public displays “stupid,” but really because he lives in fear of his parents discovering his homosexuality. The last time she visited him here Nathan and his father sat in the library and talked about stocks. All night he was the perfect son, the obedient little boy, but on the train ride back he bit his thumbnail and would not speak. “Do you want to talk about it?” Celia asked him, and he shook his head. He would hide from them always. The happy relationship Andrew enjoys with his liberal, accepting parents is probably his most powerful weapon against Nathan, and the one which he withholds until the last minute, for the final attack.

 

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