Page Turner Pa

by David Leavitt

  In his room at the Sheraton, near Fiumicino, he did not unpack. Instead he sat on the edge of the bed, gazing out the window at the cars on their way to the airport. Their progress had a curiously tranquilizing effect on him. Indeed, even the room itself, so coldly functional after the overstuffed Bristol, seemed to radiate a dull, impersonal sense of possibility that calmed Kennington: the architectural equivalent of a blank page. Nor would anyone be able to track him down here. Of course Paul might try his little trick of going through the hotel listings in the yellow pages; and yet somehow Kennington doubted that even Paul would guess where he'd come.

  Tomorrow, he thought. Home. Home to Joseph.

  And would he ever meet the Porterfields again? Run into Paul at Lincoln Center? Stumble up against Pamela outside the opera house in San Francisco? Right now Paul was probably still at Tivoli. And Pamela ... she was probably at the Bernini, reading or weeping. Looking forward to Paul coming home, at which point they would head over to the Bar della Pace, wait for him fifteen minutes, half an hour...

  Then what would they do?

  He didn't want to guess.

  The next day Kennington boarded a plane for New York, while Paul and his mother caught a morning train to Florence.

  MUSICLAND

  12

  "IF YOU'RE NOT even going to make an effort, I don't see what the point is," Bobby Newman told Teddy Moss, getting up from between his knees.

  Over the smooth edge of The Wall Street Journal he was reading (paper sharp enough to draw blood), Teddy watched impassively while his friend pulled on white underpants.

  "Whatever," he said. Then he stubbed out a cigar in the ashtray and returned to his article, which concerned certain recent advancements in the fiber optics industry.

  "What are you doing that for?"

  "I hate cigars. I was only smoking it, or pretending to smoke it, for your sake."

  "Oh, that's great. That really makes my day." Bobby was nearly trembling with fury, which Teddy found funny. Also, Bobby knew Teddy found his fury funny. This was the worst part. He could have picked up the ashtray and thrown it against the wall, except probably it wouldn't have broken. (There was a dull bruise near the window where he'd thrown it once before.) Also, if he did throw the ashtray, he knew, Teddy's bemusement would very likely transform instantly into mute and focused rage. "That's it," he'd say, pick Bobby up and heave him out the door, just like the ashtray. Such brutal and efficient silences were what Bobby loved best in Teddy, and gazing at his friend's languorous half erection bobbing below newsprint, he became once again amorous, aroused. "Teddy," he said.

  Teddy peered at him over his newspaper.

  "Can I—"

  "It was your idea. Don't blame me if you bit off more than you can chew."

  "I'm sorry I got so huffy. I just felt ignored."

  "You wanted to be ignored. You said, and I quote, 'Let me suck you off while you read The Wall Street Journal. Pretend you don't even notice I'm doing it.'"

  "Yes, pretend. But I got the feeling you actually didn't notice."

  "The article was interesting."

  "I guess I'm not sure what I want," Bobby said. "I'm only nineteen." Pulling his underpants off again, he curled in a fetal position between Teddy's knees and held his cock as if it were a microphone.

  "Talk about biting off more than you can chew," he said.

  "Pretty interesting," Teddy said. "Apple stock has gone down three-eighths."

  Bobby made a guttural noise.

  A few minutes later, the phone rang.

  "Hello?" Teddy said, picking up.

  "Teddy? It's Mrs. Porterfield."

  "Oh, hi, Mrs. Porterfield, how are you?"

  "Oh, well, you know. The divorce and all. But I do what I can to get through the day."

  "That's too bad."

  "By the way, I saw your mother in the supermarket this morning. We had a little chat. She can't wait to see you at Christmas." A pause. "And is Paolino about, perchance?"

  "No, he's at school, practicing."

  "Of course! Always practicing. I never seem to catch him at home."

  "I can take a message if you want."

  "Just tell him I called. I ... well, to be honest, Teddy, sometimes I think I call too much. I worry it bothers him. What do you think? Do you think it bothers him?"

  "I really couldn't speak for Paul, Mrs. Porterfield."

  "No, of course not. Well, in any event, your mom and I agreed, it'll be wonderful having you boys home for Christmas. When are you coming?"

  "Soon." (He winked at Bobby.)

  "What was that?"

  "The twentieth! Yes, the twentieth."

  "Oh, Pablo's coming the twenty-first. And when are you going back to New York?"

  "Third of January."

  "I sure am jealous! Your mom gets you for four more days than I get Pauly. Oh well. It's been lovely chatting with you, Teddy. And do let Paolo know I called."

  "Will do."

  "Bye-bye."

  Bye.

  He hung up.

  "Your roommate's mother?" Bobby asked, getting up to wash his hands.

  There was no reply.

  "I always wonder whether he really exists."

  "He does."

  "Do I ever get to meet him? Is he cute?"

  "Not your type. Anyway, I told you, he's always practicing. He's a pianist."

  "Oh yeah, with some big-shot lover in the theater world, isn't that right?"

  "It's supposed to be a secret. I'm not supposed to say who it is."

  "Doesn't matter. I don't know anything about theater." Kissing Teddy, Bobby grimaced. "Yuck, you taste like cigar. Brush your teeth."

  "Fuck you," Teddy said. "It was only because you asked me." But he went to the kitchen sink and brushed his teeth anyway.

  When Paul arrived an hour later to pick up his mail, Teddy and Bobby were already gone. In their wake a heavy odor of sex suffused the air: sweat and mouthwash and ... but what was that peculiar stench, that almost sugary bitterness, like burnt chestnuts? Oh, a cigar: still wet at the tip, it stood shoved headfirst into its embers like a dark and stubby phallus. From the sofa, the interleaved pages of a Wall Street Journal cascaded onto the floor. Paul picked them up. Underneath was a white sock. Teddy never wore white socks. And who'd brought The Wall Street Journal into the apartment? Teddy only read The Village Voice. The owner of the white sock, no doubt. As it was none of his business, he dropped the pages of the newspaper where he'd found them.

  His room was a haven of neatness in the rather unkempt apartment. Amid the carefully arranged implements on the desk—pens and pencils in a jar, legal pad, Liquid Paper in white and yellow, a Scotch tape dispenser—Teddy had left Paul's mail: two letters from his mother, one from his father, and a Steinway circular. He opened his father's letter first. In it, Kelso explained facts of which Pamela, by phone, had already apprised him: as soon as the divorce came through, he and Muriel Peete were getting married. "I hope you will have lunch with us when you're home for Xmas," Kelso wrote,

  though if you prefer not to we understand. And Muriel wants you to know that she never expects to be a substitute mother for you just as she would never expect me to be a substitute father for her Stewart who is yr. age.

  At the bottom, in a rather feverish hand, Muriel had added, "Can't wait to meet you, Paul!" and drawn a Santa Claus face.

  After folding up his father's letter, Paul opened the first of his mother's. "Menlo Park," he read in the top righthand corner, "4:12 A.M."

  That was all he needed to know. He slid the letter back into its envelope, then put a CD on his old stereo—it was Kennington's debut (Chopin préludes)—switched off the light, and lay down on the hard little bed. Some previous occupant of the apartment had pasted glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Now a greenish firmament spread out above him: constellations and planets, comets, nebulae and sprays of tiny stars. This private universe was something Paul would have liked to share with Alden Haynes, his lover of t
he past two months, except that Alden had never once come up and spent the night with him. Oh, Paul asked him sometimes—requests Alden always greeted with friendly laughter. What was the point, his laughter implied, when his own place was so much more comfortable? And Paul had to agree, Aldens seven-room co-op on Central Park West was more comfortable. So they slept every night in that immense bed with its ecru sheets, that bed from the ample widths of which the treetops of Central Park could be viewed, but where the ceiling held no stars. Comfort and luxury. Paul liked Alden; hoped, suspected, dreaded he might spend years with Alden, until one or the other of them died. At first that bed had seemed the hot navel of the world. But now they lay side by side most nights reading, Alden's half-glasses slipping off his nose, while the lamp buzzed like a mosquito. "I'll have to get that fixed," he always said, sounding for all the world like Paul's own father. And would Kennington, with whom he had once watched a Roman sky open, have appreciated his ceilingful of stars?

  Keys sounded in the lock. Getting up and lowering the volume on the stereo, Paul peered through the door into the living room, where Teddy was unwinding his scarf.

  "How's it going?" Teddy asked, smiling his best Optimists' Club smile.

  "Not bad." Paul emerged fully from the dark. "I just came by to check my mail."

  Opening a can of Diet Coke, Teddy sat down on the sofa. "Your mother called this afternoon. It was pretty funny, the whole time we were talking I was getting a blow job." With his left hand he fingered the cigar butt. "It's probably none of my business ... still, I thought I ought to tell you. She doesn't sound good."

  "She isn't." Paul sat down across from him. "By the way, I finished Maurice. Thanks for loaning it to me."

  "What did you think?"

  "I liked everything except the ending. Probably I'm skeptical, but the fact that you never get to hear what actually happens to Maurice and Alec after they run away together doesn't sit well with me. Besides, what is a greenwood?"

  "Let's look it up, shall we?" And getting up, Teddy pulled his American Heritage Dictionary from the shelf. '"Greenwood,"' he read, scrolling with his finger. '"A wood or forest with green foliage.'" He shut the dictionary. "Actually, according to my professor, it comes from Edward Carpenter. He was this queer philosopher who basically left the world and went off with his lover George Merrill to be woodcutters together."

  "Left the world? Is that possible?"

  "Maybe then. But it doesn't matter, my professor says, because for men of Forster's generation the greenwood was a hypothetical gay-positive space they had to posit in order to will into being." Smiling, he stuck out his tongue, then went off to his room to study.

  "A hypothetical gay-positive space," Paul repeated to himself as he rode downtown on the subway. It occurred to him that until recently he'd thought of Alden Haynes's apartment as a kind of greenwood, a place defined by its opposition to the world, from which it brooked no trespass. But was it, really? The conclusions of most stories, he decided, were probably lies, except in the case of biographies, which end the way lives do: in death. For greenwoods die too. The world encroaches upon them, or there are encroachments from within. What happens when, as months pass (there must be a house or hut, a primitive kitchen), the boiling liquid of new love thickens and cools? Becomes, in effect, a preserve? (What else is marriage?) Paul thought the metaphor of jam-making apposite, since this was a domestic story—albeit one rarely told when the protagonists were both men.

  At Alden's building, the doorman with the glossy black hair greeted Paul jovially. Fabric braids glinted on his shoulders as he pushed the revolving door. Then a second doorman rang for the elevator, which had a little velvet bench on which Paul sat. (In certain crucial ways he was still a child.) Indeed, he was already sitting, when a man ran into the lobby, and cried, "Wait!" Pulse quickening, Paul pressed the "door open" button. "Thank you," the man said breathlessly, and looked Paul over. "But haven't we met?"

  Paul gulped. Of course he recognized Joseph Mansourian, had recognized him from the moment he'd come leaping through the door.

  "Yes we have," Paul said. "I'm Paul Porterfield. I turned pages for Richard Kennington in San Francisco last spring."

  Joseph snapped his fingers. "Of course! The well-dressed page turner! And what brings you to my building?"

  "I didn't know it was your building. I have a friend who lives here."

  The elevator reached the sixteenth floor, and the doors slid open. "Sixteen?" Joseph said. "Then your friend must be Alden Haynes."

  "That's right."

  "Funny that we haven't run into each other. Alden and I go way back. How's Public Theater working out, by the way?"

  "Oh, great. He loves it. He's very busy, of course."

  "That was quite a coup for Alden. Well, I'd better not hold up the elevator. Call me sometime." He fished in his pocket. "Here's my card."

  "Thanks. You already gave it to me."

  "I assume, by the way, that you're at Juilliard?"

  "First year."

  "Everything going all right? Anything I can do to help?"

  "Fine. No, nothing, thanks." He cracked his knuckles. "By the way ... how is Mr. Kennington doing these days?"

  "Richard? Oh, terribly well, terribly well. He's in Japan."

  "I see. Say hello to him for me, will you?"

  "Sure. Tell me your name again?"

  "Paul Porterfield."

  "Paul Porterfield. I'll remember."

  The elevator closed on Paul's face.

  He was now standing in Alden's familiar hall, with its gray carpeting. More than two months had passed since that afternoon Alden had picked him up during an intermission at the Met—months over the course of which this hall had become, in its way, as familiar to him as that of his parents' embattled house in Menlo Park. And during those months, he had at last experienced the world. He'd gone to parties and concerts. An important actress had fawned over him; a famous opera singer, slipping him his phone number, had suggested they "keep each other in the wings"—not an uncommon experience in New York when you are young and good-looking, and possess a certain surface panache. As Paul was learning, the short-term attentions of the powerful are cheaper to obtain than he would ever have previously guessed.

  Yet he never ran into Kennington. Of course he kept his eyes peeled. Tushi Strauss, who knew Alden from somewhere, came by to say hello once at a restaurant, in the company of a much younger man: she didn't seem to remember Paul. Also the pianist Magda Tanca, with whom Kennington had once made a recording. But not Kennington himself. Thus Paul's surprise at running into Mr. Mansourian. It was as if, over the months since they'd come back from Italy, he'd ceased to believe in Kennington, as if their affair had been merely a travel-induced dream. Now he had to concede its reality, as well as Mr. Mansourian's apparent ignorance of the facts.

  Taking out his keys, he let himself into the apartment. "Alden?" he called, for the lights were on in the entrance hall.

  "In here!"

  Quietly Paul made his way to the living room, where Alden was standing on a leather armchair, a hammer and nails in his right hand. A framed photograph of Norman, his lover of twelve years, was tucked under his arm.

  "How are you today?"

  "Not bad." Sitting down in the armchair's twin, Paul watched while Alden marked the spot where the nail should go, then rammed it home. In the window, the armchairs, the glow of the fire and reading lamp and wall sconces, seemed superimposed on the dark treetops and blocks of skyline, to which they lent a faint radiance of domestic warmth.

  "There," Alden said, climbing down and stepping back to admire the picture, in which Norman, wearing tennis shorts, posed with his racket. "What do you think?"

  "Nice."

  "That picture's ancient. Norman couldn't have been much older than you." He put the hammer and nails on top of the piano. Alden was a fair-skinned, well-groomed man of forty, a little on the chubby side, and though he went out to dinner as often as Henry James had in his heyday, he ra
rely if ever invited friends to his apartment. And this, Paul suspected, was chiefly because he didn't want anyone to see the extent to which he had remodeled the place as a shrine to the dead Norman. According to Alden, this impulse to memorialize stemmed from love, pure and simple; only in cynical moments did Paul suspect his friend of trying to expiate a posthumous guilt. For since he'd been eighteen, Alden had had a habit of falling in love with eighteen-year-olds. The trouble was, everyone kept growing older—Norman kept getting older—while the world's supply of eighteen-year-olds remained inexhaustible.

  No one had lied to Paul. Alden himself hadn't lied to him. Even before they'd slept together, he'd explained who Norman had been, come clean about his own HIV status, suggested, as if it were a business proposition, that if Paul might be willing to stick it out with him for a couple of years, a fairly large inheritance would be his reward. All of which, at first, had horrified Paul's innate and youthful sense of optimism. And yet in a world where people ran away without saying good-bye, perhaps business arrangements, in the end, were more trustworthy than love affairs. So he had accepted Alden's terms, and to his surprise, discovered that he felt more than he would have expected. Not love, exactly; instead something more serene and reliable than love: fondness alloyed with esteem.

  "By the way, I had a real surprise coming home this afternoon," Paul said. "I ran into someone I knew in the elevator."