Etheridge had known he was unable to write that well himself. ‘Wasn’t that difficult for you?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t that put a strain on your relationship?’
‘It helped it. Because I was so outside it all, he could always find refuge with me. And because what I was doing was on a less intense level. The worst thing that ever happens in my field is you don’t get project funding. It was a relief for him … umm. Umm …’ Tobermann ticced. ‘It kept us balanced, equal.’
‘Which you weren’t when you first met,’ I said, seeing it, ‘because he was an established author while you were only a graduate student?’
‘Which was at first an advantage for me. Like this exotic fieldmouse arriving in this new environment. Because of my youth, and my distance from his set, my distance from the literary world, I was able to be protected by Roll while I developed. He nurtured me. I was able to observe it and learn how to behave. Until I was ready to go out on my own. Even then, Roll aided me. Because he loved nature and hiked with me on field trips. They were fairly local as we were still living in Manhattan.’
‘So you were put in a position to return the favor later.’
‘Right. By the time Roll’s … umm. Umm … cancer was diagnosed, we’d already passed the crossover mark. We were already headed in the opposite direction. It was only natural I became the care giver. Now,’ Tobermann said in a more official voice, thus changing the subject. ‘Look! This is the local fieldmouse’s scat.’ He pointed to four little striated brown pebbles left in the middle of a dirt path. ‘Fecal droppings. Probably adult.’ He pulled a camera film case out of his pocket, scooped up the scat, closed it, covered it with white matt tape and marked date and place, then attached it to a clip thonged to his belt. He opened the laptop, snapped it on, brought up some schedule, hit a few keys, closed it again. ‘Scat locates them better than anything. They’re too small to see. Back in the lab, I’ll do analysis, find out where they’ve been, what they’re eating. How good their health is.’
I was able to point out three more examples for Tobermann. Luckily from a ‘doe’ of the exotic species. He avidly collected and marked and put it away and tapped out something on the laptop. I kept thinking about what he’d said about his and Etheridge’s relationship. Something else wasn’t yet clear. ‘I don’t mean to pry,’ I said a bit later, ‘but you live alone?’
‘And Homer, the cat. You mean people? Yes, alone.’
‘Since Rowland Etheridge died?’ I asked.
‘If you’re thinking I’m broken-hearted and all, try again.’
‘Because?’
‘Because while, sure, I miss him and all, we were always more, you know, roommates, friends, fuck buddies, than romantic. Fine with me. It turned out fine with Roll. When we met, he told me he’d had enough of all that with Norman to last a lifetime.’
‘His first lover?’ I asked. ‘You two met in – what? – ’83?’
‘Year after. At UMASS, Amherst.’
‘He’d broken up with Norman earlier. In ’76 or so. Wasn’t someone in between? Maybe he meant that other fellow?’
‘No. No one in between.’
‘What about Len Spurgeon? Roll tell you about him?’
‘Oh, sure. But Len just lived there. Roll took care of him.’
‘Took care of him?’
‘The way you take care of someone sick.’
‘Len was sick?’ I asked. ‘In – when was it? – 1982 or so?’
‘Roll helped nurse him back to health.’
For a second I thought maybe Len had contracted AIDS and that was why … now I was stymied. ‘Sick with what?’
‘At first amebiasis. Some kind of cryptospiridium he’d picked up in the Caribbean. But the treatment sickened him worse. It turned out Len was allergic to Flagyl, the usual treatment for intestinal parasites. So he went to this specialist, who gave Len something new. Diotiquin. It killed the parasites in Len’s digestive tract okay, but contained traces of arsenic in it, and it turned out Len was even more allergic to that than to the Flagyl. His body couldn’t shake the arsenic for a long time. He remained poisoned months. Sick to his stomach, like being seasick. Occasional worse bouts of nausea and vomiting. Roll wrote about it to the others. Dom, I think. I could find the letters back at the house if you gave me a few minutes. Stop. Absolutely still.’ His voice turned into a whisper. ‘Turn right. Look down ten degrees.’
I did as instructed, and at first saw what looked like a few fallen logs, and around them large fungi. Then something moved and I realized it was a fieldmouse. No, two. Wait, three, more, maybe five or six little ones surrounding a larger one. ‘Local or exotic?’ I whispered.
‘Local. With a new litter.’ I could feel thrill in his voice. Although we were quiet, the rodents stopped and faced our direction. Their ears went up. Their pointed noses twitched. A second later they were gone. So fast, so noiseless, I’d not seen it.
We waited a minute, then Tobermann went to where they’d been. We hunkered down on the uncomfortable angle of dirt and log and he checked. He began scooping up half-bitten seeds and pine nuts; I pointed out the edge of a mushroom which was chewed and Tobermann broke it off, included that too in a film case.
‘You’re not half bad at this,’ he said, once we were hiking back up to the Jeep. ‘Observant. Logical. You ever consider going into science?’
‘I’m having a hard enough time with people.’
‘Don’t think dealing with animals is all fun and games. For example, if for some reason in the future I deem this local rodent endangered, say because I notice smaller or fewer litters, or because of substantially fewer actual sightings, well then, by law, I have to report it immediately to the appropriate state and federal wildlife protection agencies. I have to prepare a feasibility study on the rodents’ survival under various intervention and non-intervention scenarios. I have to make recommendations for what kind of intervention should be used, whether a captive-breeding program or “thinning” the exotic rodent population. Maybe translocation of the local species to another habitat. It’s complex. The ethical issues aren’t easy or clear.’
‘Jesus! And I thought I was organized!’
My expostulation was in response to having returned to the rented house via another fast, jolting drive in the Jeep, taken off muddy high-tops, been brought into a bedroom now office, though not Tobermann’s lab, where I faced a wall of foot-square cubbyholes ten feet wide and eight high.
‘I didn’t know how else to arrange them,’ Tobermann explained. ‘You know. For the Timrod Collection and … umm. Umm … for Mr Weatherbury, who needed things for the two volumes he edited. I thought, maybe … umm. Umm … someone else would come. I tried to figure out how, and all I could settle on was … umm. Umm … chronological. From the top and going down. Thirty-six boxes. From 1959 to 1995.’
I couldn’t help but notice how his tic worsened now that he was out of the field and indoors. Or was it because he was dealing with an area of expertise he wasn’t familiar with? Whichever, he was tic-cing all the time now. I tried to calm him.
‘It’s terrific! You’ve done a great job! I don’t know that I could have done it any more simply or elegantly.’
‘You think? It just seemed, you know, logical.’
I looked at the top shelf cubbyholes. Each held loosebound plays. The plays produced at Yale, I supposed. And down at the last few cubbyholes, which contained a transparent-covered sheaf of what I took at first glance to be the unfinished Civil War novel. There was something else in that shelf, a pale-blue-covered claspleaf. I bent to look more closely.
‘May I?’ I asked, reading ‘Excerpts – Sophonisba Peabody Smith -Confederate Colonel’. I’d just glimpsed the other enough to see it had a different title.
‘Sure. Whatever. I’ll get Roll’s letters. That’s where the references to Len are. Something to drink? Coffee? Tea?’
The tea would be in a bag, the coffee instant. I said coffee.
‘Here we go.’ Tobermann removed t
hree paper accordion files out of a lower drawer of a large, old-fashioned roll-top desk. He put two away, pulled out the third and laid it on the desk. It was ‘1980-85. Carbons of letters.’ Five pockets, labeled by year. At 1982, I pulled out a packet neatly clasped on three sides, wound with a thick rubber band.
‘You’re a bibliographer’s dream! Most people hand you a wad of crap!’
I thought Tobermann was going to blush, but he ticced once in evident discomfort and left the room, I guessed to the kitchen to make us coffee.
Once he was gone I turned to the wall bookshelf for Etheridge’s final year. As I’d thought, the other MS that caught my eye was not the novel fragment. I read on the cover page, ‘Teenbeat and Other Poems’ and below that, ‘A private edition especially prepared for DDP by his old friend and admirer REE’.
Poems! Who knew Etheridge wrote poems? I was certain the others never mentioned it. Not Fleming. Not Cummings. I’d remember if they had.
The first page was not a table of contents, as I’d expected, but the title poem. The next twenty pages were poetry, closely printed. Most a page long, one poem several pages long. The final page was verso, and had a postcard pasted to the recto, an inner sheet of the same construction paper as the pamphlet’s cover. A postcard of a black and white photograph had been glued in as a sort of envoi. It pictured three nude pre-adolescent boys, one leaning against, one standing athwart, the third upon and partly within a tall old wooden dory shelved upon a beach. The boys’ heads looked round and vulnerable as a result of being closely cut. Their figures looked both babylike and adult, boyish yet girlish too. Their buttocks looked as soft and lightly furred as ripe apricots. All three had been photographed faced away from the viewer, looking to sea. I turned back to the MS. A fast scan of the text brought to light lines confirming the content. Let these serve as example: ‘I fear that life is like a passing boy/ Who, followed block on block to some dark door/ Will pause at last to talk and then to toy.’
Footsteps. Guiltily, I put the manuscript back, thinking, ‘Rowland Etheridge was a boy lover! A boy lover! How does that fit with anything?’
Back at the desk, accordion file on the floor, I rapidly began shuffling through the letters, all neatly typed, looking for references to Len Spurgeon, all the while unable to stop thinking, ‘Etheridge was a boy lover. That throws it into a new light. But if that’s true, then where does Len or, for that matter, where does Tobermann come into the picture?’
‘Coffee’ll be ready in a minute. Drip okay?’
‘Sounds great. Thanks. It’ll take me a while … Would you mind … I feel I understand someone better if I can see their face. And I’m just totally blanking on Rowland Etheridge’s face. You wouldn’t have a photo album or something? Photos of maybe the two of you, when you first met. From the time the letters I’m reading were written?’
Tobermann looked startled, ticced extravagantly, then said, ‘Oh, sure! I can understand why you need that.’
A few minutes later I’d separated the year’s many letters into piles. One of Etheridge’s letters to Dominic de Petrie (the DDP of the poetry chapbook dedication, I was sure); another, far smaller one of Etheridge’s letters to Damon Von Slyke and Aaron Axenfeld; a third of his letters to everyone else, which I put back.
Scanning the second batch I arrived at several mentions of Len Spurgeon’s name to Axenfeld. Len had moved in with Etheridge in April of 1982. ‘You were absolutely right about Len. At times I scarcely know he’s here,’ he wrote to Axenfeld. And in another letter, ‘He’s now taking some new medicine called Zantac that costs a dollar a pill! He must take a minimum of three per day, directly after each meal.’ A third letter added, ‘Len said we didn’t have to eat together, or even in the same room. The reason of course is that he belches so often, then reddens terribly afterward. I try to tell him it’s all right. That I know he can’t control it and that I’m not offended. I even once told him that when he does it, I’ll simply fantasize he’s my Hell’s Angel biker lover. Poor thing, he only blushes more.’
To Von Slyke, Etheridge writes little about Len, until a June 1982 letter in which he says, ‘Poor thing. He’s ailing virtually all the time! Perhaps an hour or two will go by when he’s not ashen or pale green in facial color, but then I can see it all change, actually watch his visage alter, become constricted-looking, and he has to get up and leave the room.’ And in a later letter, ‘The other day, poor Len was so very weak, he barely could bring himself to crawl up to the chaise-longue where I’d settled to read over what I’d written earlier that afternoon, and he just lay his head on my leg. And not the good leg either. But you know, it really didn’t bother me in the least.’ And again, ‘I remember how ill I used to be when I was a child. Feeling just terrible all day, days on end, weeks on end. I know what Len’s going through. As God is my witness, Dame, if I ever have to be as endlessly ill as I was again, I won’t go through it. I’ll end it all and kill myself.’
‘Which is exactly what he did,’ I said to myself. Or rather not quite to myself. Tobermann was in the doorway again, holding open a forest-green naugahyde photo album. ‘You ever read these letters?’ I asked.
‘I used to. When Roll first died. And when I was getting everything ready for the collection. Maureen, was that her name? She asked me to separate out letters to and from the other Purples.’ He dropped the photo album onto the desk. ‘This what you want?’
I recognized the long modern red-brick exterior and interior of the UMASS, Amherst, drama building from productions I’d attended there. The main entrance, and lobby, with a large placard announcing the premiere of Beauregard in Brooklyn Heights. The next photo showed the placard with a mustachioed Rowland Etheridge next to it. Either an effect of the overhead lights or something making his hair look red. I asked Tobermann about that. ‘It was chestnut. But at sunset and on the beach it often took on red highlights.’ Other photos on this page were of the cast, the stage crew, the theater company. In a few, in a back row, looking over someone’s shoulder, was a tall, butter-yellow-haired boy. He looked familiar, but then no. But wait, wasn’t he …
‘That’s you!’ I pointed Tobermann out.
‘We’d met maybe five minutes before the photos were taken. Roll wouldn’t let go of me. He invited me to the cast party afterward at the Lord Jeff Inn.’
Tobermann turned the album to the next page and the next. More photos of him and Rowland Etheridge. And now I think I was getting at the source of the relationship.
‘How old were you then? You look maybe ten!’
‘Twenty. No, I’d just turned twenty-one, that May.’
‘You look like a kid,’ I said, which was true. Not only looked like it, but seemed to act like a kid in the photos. Not in any way a contemporary of the other students in the cast.
‘I looked like a kid until two years ago,’ Tobermann admitted. ‘Now I look like an old man. The coffee must be ready. What do you take?’
‘Black. Two sugars.’
While he was gone I looked through the next few pages of the photo album. Manhattan. Summer. Or spring. Rowland and Christian along the Hudson River piers. The old giant metal-sheet and wood-frame piers still mostly standing, a few looking punched in at their sides, falling apart. Axenfeld had written about those piers. De Petrie and Von Slyke had set scenes in novels there. Now the photos changed to autumn in what I knew was Manhattan’s Abingdon Square Park, at what looked to be an autumn festival. Or was it the Saturday morning greenmarket De Petrie had written of? There, could that be, in a photo with Rowland, De Petrie?
The coffee arrived in a mug, thick, black, steaming.
‘Is this who I think it is?’ I pointed.
‘Dom.’
‘He looks very attractive.’
‘He was very attractive. If you like that dark, bearded, muscular, clone-dressed look. Which millions did.’
‘Which you didn’t?’
‘Dom never looked at me. He moved in higher circles.’
‘Other
authors, you mean?’
‘Male models and Fire Island Pines beauties, I mean.’
‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘None of the other Purples write about his looks. I’ve seen maybe a dozen or more photos of him. But he himself complained he never photographed well. And the other Purples write about each other. Axenfeld about how many people fell over themselves for Mitch Leo and Von Slyke and he about how gorgeous Mark Dodge was, what a beautiful face Jeff Weber had. But no one wrote about De Petrie.’
‘Roll didn’t care for Dom’s looks. Too ethnic, he said. But no one could figure whether that ethnic look was Greek? Syrian? Italian? Spanish? Or Arabic? If you liked dark men, which many people did and do, but which Roll didn’t particularly, you’d like De Petrie. All I knew of his private life was the talk and that was plenty!’
‘And …’
‘The talk went that De Petrie slept with anyone and everyone he wanted. He had the handsomest boyfriends the most consistently of all the Purples. But no one accused him of being vain. He seemed not to pay much attention to his looks. He dressed simply. Tight-fitting denims with a button open, close-fitting T-shirt and polos, leather bomber jacket. Clone look, but hot. He never made a thing about it. But we three would sometimes be walking down a West Village street together, me and Roll and Dom, and I could see guys’ heads just lock onto him and then swivel watching him pass. They wouldn’t even see us but their eyes would all but rip off Dom’s clothing. You … umm. Umm … find what you’re looking for?’
The Book of Lies Page 31