‘Since then, the ravens have come back three times. Each time, someone close to me dies. Ravens at Truro never lie.’
Our appetizers arrived.
‘Not a moment too soon! Or we’d lose all appetite,’ he quipped.
After we’d dispatched the food, I said, ‘Naturally I’ve read about the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s and early ’90s. But I can’t even begin to conjecture what it was like. You must have suffered awfully!’
‘What is it James writes about Stransom in The Altar of the Dead?’ De Petrie asked rhetorically. ‘“He had perhaps not had more losses than most men, but he had counted his losses more; he had not seen death more closely, but he had, in a manner, felt it more deeply.” Except that I have seen it more closely. All too closely. All too often! But let’s not talk about morbid things. Let’s talk about you. About what I read today.’
Our entrees arrived, mine lobster on a bed of capellini, his stuffed calamari on linguine, compelling our immediate attention. I tried not to stare at De Petrie as we ate, but while I glanced at the waiters, the decor, my food, the other diners, I found myself pondering the reserves of courage he must have discovered within himself to have gone through so many illnesses, so many deaths, at such close range, so many years in a row.
When I – when virtually anyone I knew – thought of Dominic De Petrie, it was commonly as that unnatural prodigy, the successful author, one who’d managed to keep his career not only going but evolving, expanding over three decades. Of course it had helped that his talent was of the dazzling rather than the subtle kind. As a result he’d been fortuitous almost from the beginning. De Petrie’s first three novels, predating the Purple Circle – and, really, gay literature – had nevertheless been decisive critical and commercial hits, each building on the other. The biggest hit, Singles, set in Manhattan’s Upper East Side and told from the dual point of view of a young man and a young woman involved in an impossible relationship, was not only a best-seller, it was optioned for the movies by producers and film stars for years.
Not satisfied with high sales, not contented with a Hemingway and other book award nominations, De Petrie had the effrontery to forge into untried territory and publish a book of gay themed poetry. A Choice of Faces was scarcely noticed by his usual audience, barely reviewed except in the new gay media, but like Jeff Weber’s volume of verse, it sold several small editions, and ended up influencing an entire generation of gay poets. Far more influential in varying, mostly unexpected, ways would be De Petrie’s next book, the novel Prowl, an even greater departure for him, a psychological thriller set deep within the nucleus of New York’s gay disco and club scene.
Prowl was the first, many since said the best, gay-themed thriller. It was hard-hitting, authentic in scene and customs, explosively violent, astonishingly candid about the sex and relationships gay men had with each other. This ‘revelation of secrets’, this ‘washing of dirty laundry in public’, led many prominent gay politicos to viciously attack De Petrie and his book, in print and in speeches. For some months after the book’s publication, his life was threatened so virulently, so often, he had to hire security guards and for a while even leave home. On the plus side, Prowl was the first gay-themed novel picked up by a major book club. That, and the reviews in the mainstream press, which veered from the highest praise to blistering criticism, rendered the novel’s publication an event. Sales in hardcover, paper and in translation into a half-dozen languages ended up far surpassing his previous novels. For the following decade, gay youths coming out in San Diego, Indianapolis, Bangor, London, Berlin, Sydney, São Paulo and Tokyo would have Prowl as a guide, a promise – and a warning. It would be more than a decade before another of De Petrie’s titles surpassed it in celebrity or sales, and that would be uniquely different, as controversial, even more beloved: The Adventures of Marty.
However spectacular for De Petrie’s career, had he stopped writing or died after the publication of Prowl, his reputation would doubtless be far less than it turned out; above that of Cameron Powers and Rowland Etheridge, but below that of Axenfeld, Von Slyke and even Mark Dodge, somewhere in the general area of Jeff Weber or Mitch Leo. It was the second, quieter, phase of De Petrie’s lifework that ended up attracting serious readers as well as scholars of Dr St George’s stature. Because while it might have been sufficiently bold for an author to sacrifice an achieved name and recognition to go on to help create an entire genre – i.e. gay literature – and be responsible for some of its early masterworks, De Petrie went further. In the 1980s and 1990s, he assembled a succession of gay-themed books that crossed formal lines others never suspected were in place and then went on to fulfill the newly devised expectations to the utmost. In his study of the Purple Circle, Thaddeus Fleming admitted he didn’t know which would ultimately prove the more important, De Petrie’s middle-period fiction – the experimental short stories in Gay Tragic Romances, his idyllic A Summer’s Lease, the satirical Advice to a Jewish Prince – or his nonfiction works – memoirs, essays, mixed genres – including, The Last Good Year for Cadillacs, Chrome Earrings and Saturdays – and Rain!
Even those paled, Erling Cummings, Reuben Weatherbury and Irian St George believed, to books De Petrie released after: the novel The Adventures of Marty; the memoirs Agent for the Deceased and Death and Art in Greenwich Village; the novella Absolute Ebony; and his most recently published book, Conversations in the Dark, about which critics were divided as to its genre if not quality. Cummings voiced the not uncommon belief when he wrote ‘that final quintet represents a heady culmination of a consummate mastery of form and style’. Fleming concentrated upon the work from Marty on. ‘Each book undertakes a giant vault into some unforseeable future of literature, which it predicts, then goes on to shape and define.’
These were my own favorites among the Purple Circle’s many attainments. I felt I would have to re-read late De Petrie again and again as I aged and grew more experienced to comprehend what I sensed lay unrevealed beneath the more easily graspable surface layers, as in those figures and scenes Old Masters underpainted that only years of the most intimate knowledge and loving scrutiny disclose. I wasn’t certain I’d possess the intelligence or vocabulary I suspected was required to articulate it all, and I wondered how much this weekend encounter would help or work against any ultimate wisdom.
Our few previous phone conversations, along with this encounter, had confirmed for me Dominic De Petrie’s urbane, accessible erudition and the facility with which he seemed able to manipulate his intelligence and his listener’s response, as though they formed a single, brilliant, multicolored mantle that he, like a magician, waved and spun in your face, to baffle, evoke thrills, chills and applause, and ultimately enthrall.
Against that I had to place De Petrie’s all too evident personality. It was refreshing in one sense, as the no-longer-young can be bracing, in that he evidently did not believe he had to accommodate anyone by social inanities such as diplomacy, politeness, or unguardedness. On the other hand, he’d revealed aspects of himself I felt not everyone would consider of the highest order: his puerile glee in expensive, gaudy machines, in using them to outwit the police: his adolescently fast – though so far unperilous – driving; his preening attitude toward himself and all that was his; his air of presumption about what he’d earned, what he possessed, what he’d accomplished, whom he’d known. I was doubtless meeting him too late to suffer from what I suspected had once been a noteworthy personal vanity, but not, I sensed, by that many years. No surprise then, that the not-unperceptive De Petrie no longer allowed interviews, or indeed any but the rarest of public appearances. Since he had no apparent intention of bending to anyone’s conception of whom he ought to be or seem to be or how he ought to act, but intended instead to follow his own whim of iron, why subject his reputation to further criticism? While I, adoring fan, and moreover an adoring fan who actually wanted something from him, well, I was hardly in a position to breathe the tiniest iota of criticism, was I? He was ut
terly safe with me.
Our dinner plates were being cleared off, and now we could converse again. I took the offensive.
‘What do you think?’ I got up the courage to ask. ‘Do I make a case?’
‘You mean of what I read today?’ De Petrie asked, then uncharacteristically professed, ‘I’m scarcely to be considered an authority. Irian St George would be more apropos. It’s all intriguingly implicative. And a far richer vein than I would have presumed. I will say one thing: I learned a great deal more about Len than I’d known.’
‘Unpleasant things, probably. I’m sorry if I …’
He waved that aside. ‘New knowledge can only be an advantage. He’s dead so long now, nothing will or indeed can alter my memory of him. But you may be amused to hear that I suspected worse of Len. He did have a reputation! Naturally that wouldn’t stop me. It would only encourage me to take up with him, given the opportunity. Do you know how it was that he came to live here? How could you? We met at the Hookers’ Ball. A drag competition show and dance held at one or another of the local boîtes in P-Town. It’s an after-season affair. Generally around Columbus Day. Most of the tourists have left, so it’s only year-round residents and the seasonal staff who’ve remained. A popular event. The final blow-out of the year. I attended the one in October 1985, as I had in the past. At one of the indoor bars sat an Australian celebrity en travesti who was to be the show’s MC. He used to go around telling everyone he was straight, with a wife and kids. That might have been true, but that particular night he was trawling for boys. Men, rather. Because when I approached the bar to order a Heineken, he was trying to nab none other but Len Spurgeon. Who was by then over forty. Len remembered me. I remembered him. We amused the drag celeb with outrageous flirting and misleading promises to join him after the show for a three-way on his yacht parked out in the harbor. Then it was time for him to go on-stage. We two hung around for half the show, then found we were too horny. We went to Len’s place and screwed each other’s brains out.
‘Now I’d met Len before. Maybe as early as 1978. I knew he’d been lovers with Mark Dodge, and that he’d had a relationship of some unspecified sort, probably romantic, with Jeff Weber. I possibly knew about him and Cammy Powers. I also recalled that after some initial attraction, Mitch Leo and Len hadn’t gotten along, although I never heard or sought to discover why. I knew nothing about him and Rowland. Nor about him and Damon, nor about him and Frankie McKewen. And it wasn’t until Len had moved in here that tight-lipped Axey told me about Len’s residence in Sanibel Island, and then I suspect only because it had been a positive experience for all.
‘The truth is, I’d never been all that attracted to Len before we met at the Hookers’ Ball. At first, he’d been almost ostentatiously good-looking. Off-puttingly sexual. I’ve had my share of beautiful men in the ’70s and ’80s. Handsome as you are, you will be saddened, though not too surprised to hear, that the appeal of physical beauty is, after all, rather limited. Though Axey would, naturally, disagree. Even so, by the time we re-encountered, the initial gloss was off Len. Replaced by what I found to be a more impressive edge. Don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t a dog! Len had unquestionably aged well. That, and some other new, previously unexpected qualities I thought I saw in him at the time, vaguely interested me. Even so, when we did get together again over the first few months, it was casual. Len worked in P-Town at some photo and framing shop, had his own pals, his own apartment. He also had somewhere in his meanderings picked up a great amount of knowledge about and experience with horticulture, and he began coming out to Truro on weekends and days off to help with the gardens, about which I knew nearly zilch. I’d usually wait until he was done, rinsing off in the outdoor shower, before I’d accost him and drag him into the house for sex. It was utterly nonchalant and thoroughly harmless.
‘When without much warning he had to move out of his flat in town, I realized I was alone in a big place here and we seemed to get along, so I offered Len the room you’re sleeping in. Eventually Len totally redesigned the garden and in fact all the property’s landscaping. He took over a portion of the garage and turned it into his workshop. He began getting me to restore the house. Which we did as much as possible together without outside help. Len settled in and here he remained. Which meant I also remained here for longer periods of time. At last I gave up my apartment in Manhattan. Then, when Len began coming down with various symptoms and falling ill for longer and longer spans of time, he quit what little work he was still doing part-time in P-Town. He went on full disability and never went into town unless forced to, although we had several vehicles by then.
‘We never defined our relationship to ourselves or to anyone else. It seemed pointless. We’d both had so many previous commitments that ended disastrously, it seemed best not to even hint at the possibility. We never made demands on each other. We never placed curbs on whom we might date or screw, or socialize with. We never argued. After several years, we simply became Dominic and Len, or Len and Dom. Holiday cards and postcards from traveling friends were addressed one way or the other, invitations to events and parties. Len remarked on it wryly once. In my hearing, he said to one of my friends, “My Mom would have shit her undies with joy if she ever guessed I’d end up living like a country gentleman with a rich and famous husband.” I never knew if he was kidding or not. At any rate, Len came to cherish the house and grounds more than I did. So much so, he became part of it. Figuratively and literally. After he died and was cremated, I followed his wishes and scattered half his ashes in the garden and the rest out on Long Knoll beach, where we spent this afternoon.’
We ordered desserts. It was late. The place emptying out.
‘This may sound foolish,’ I said, ‘but I can’t help but wonder what it’s like having known so many that are … gone!’
‘I could dissemble, Ross, but the truth is you tend to become haunted! Don’t get me wrong,’ De Petrie was quick to clarify. ‘It’s not at all sensational and spine-tingling, as it’s portrayed on television or in the movies. It’s far more insidious. You remember a face out of the past. It rises three-dimensionally, if for an instant, in front of you. Or a fully inflected phrase comes to you, unbidden, complete with its unmistakable, long gone, speaker. You hear other words from others’ voices, ones you know have been long-quieted. You recall an incident not as a memory, but as though it is happening in the instant, total and complete. You constantly feel a tenuous yet unbroken connection to presences, to intelligences, you know can no longer be in operation: yet which are, to you, alone. And with them, you sense a subtle lessening of contacts to people your perceptions tell you are actually present. It doesn’t end there. Because it is continuous, unceasing: it goes on and on. After a while, you’re surprised to realize you’re living segments of your life in the past, a good share actually, and a specific not very large allotment in the present. The future holds no significance to you. Planning for it seems … insipid somehow. You’re initially surprised that no one else notices how you are living your life. Then you comprehend that’s because those who have been intimate enough or who cared enough to notice anything at all about you are simply no longer present to do so. To others you appear absent-minded, dotty, eccentric.
‘It’s all rather comforting when it has become so habitual,’ De Petrie confessed. ‘I suppose because it is so quotidian and enduring. I don’t talk about it as a rule as it usually drives people to yawn immensely. It was Henry James again who put it so wonderfully. In that same novella. Stransom thinks about his many dead loved ones. James writes, “They were there in their simplified, intensified essence, their conscious absence and expressive patience, as personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb … They asked so little that they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day, of the hard usage of life.” So, like Stransom I have my own little altar, although mine is only a few photos on an upstairs credenza. The real altar, I suppose, exists in my mind. In my books! Since the mid-’80s, they�
��re nothing but dirges and elegies and despondent testimonials!’
‘You don’t mean Adventures of Marty?
‘Don’t I? That book more than any other.’
‘But … it’s so funny! So exuberant! Not gloomy!’
‘Well, then,’ De Petrie smiled sourly, ‘my little plot worked.’
‘What little plot?’
‘To rope in all you poor unsuspecting readers! To entice you and seduce you into loving the characters so much, to make you identify with them closely, that when I then killed them off, you would have to feel something, even if it were only a smidgen of the agony I myself had gone through with the originals.’
‘Why do that? To divide, to lessen your own agony?’
‘Clever you. Yes, I admit, it was all quite deliberately sadistic on my part. Only Axey ever fathomed what I’d set out to do, and how far I’d succeeded. He called Marty my “Surreptitious Days of Sodom”.’
‘Len isn’t in that book?’ I argued.
‘Isn’t he? Len is everywhere in the book. As he’s also nowhere in particular! The way Len is, to this very day, everywhere yet nowhere in my house in Truro. The way devout Christians and Buddhists believe God is. Immanent, I believe, is the term theologians employ. Len’s in everything – not to be discerned until you are actively pursuing him – I’ve completed since he died. You realize, of course, that I’ve written nothing new since Len died. I’ve merely rewritten and revamped, completed and then subsequently very slowly released all of what in those years I was so very assiduously at work on. Those terrible years I stood by helpless watching and attempting to help nurse Len. And before Len, Mark and Jeff and Cammy and Mitch. The only reason I wrote so much in those years, you understand, was to escape the unavoidable reality around myself. To elude and avoid what I could not accept, or do anything to slow down, never mind stop. Every volume was another brick I cemented into place in my useless bulwark against the undeniable.’ De Petrie paused. ‘St George doesn’t believe a word of it He tells me I’m overdramatizing.’
The Book of Lies Page 43