Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  "Bernard! Mizz Auslander!" I called them to my desk. "Newell! Betty Jean! Nurses of all sizes and shapes! Help! Disaster looms!"

  Only the first two that I'd called actually arrived at my desk. I held out the offending paragraph, but before I could get out a word, the Grunt said, "He wants a third attribution, right?" He turned to Sydelle. "I said you'd never get away with two!" he added, having long ago mastered the art of making someone feel like shit.

  For her part, Sydelle looked one part nauseated, one part secretly pleased she'd managed to make trouble for me, and one part actually frightened. I found myself torn between wanting to comfort her and wanting to pitch her out the window and watch her land directly atop her chic Mako slantcut.

  "Mizz Auslander! Get the motel maid on the phone," I instructed. "Bernard! Once she's reached her, you take over!"

  "What are you going to do?" Sydelle asked.

  "Soften her up! Bernard, you know what to do! Promise her anything. David Bowie's genitalia on toast points if you have to. Then, scare her. Not too much. Do Mr. Sinister. When she's ready, transfer her to me. I'll be waiting."

  "Wait a minute. I don't understand...," Sydelle began.

  The Grunt had scurried to his desk. He was hunched over the phone, a great hairy spider, cracking his knuckles and chuckling to himself with glee.

  Sydelle's eyes began to widen. "What are you...?"

  "Mizz Auslander! Ne say a word pas! Just dial!"

  It took fifteen minutes for Sydelle to reach the hapless motel maid, ten minutes more for the Grunt to turn her into trembling aspic, another fifteen minutes for me to take down a statement while two other people in the office—including Harte, lui-même—listened in.

  Two hours later, when the new piece had been typeset and laid into the article, and Newell Rose's artistic ego had been stroked and Harte's publisher's ego caressed, and the printer's messenger had left the room with the corrected boards, I looked into Harte's office and said, "If you're smart, you won't expect me in on Monday."

  And slammed his door before he could explode.

  "They're holding the last seaplane of the evening for you," the Grunt told me as he handed over my weekend bag. "There's a cab waiting downstairs."

  "Bernard, you're an angel," I said, folding my Dunhill sport jacket over my arm as I turned and rushed to the door. "When I return," I shouted behind myself, "I'll give you anything you want. Anything!"

  "The head of Sydelle Auslander," he shouted, following me out into the hallway, where I'd just pressed the elevator button. "In a Peck & Peck hat box!" he remembered to add, as my car arrived and I stepped in.

  "Hello? Anyone home?"

  I dropped the weekend bag onto the floor, unrolled my pants cuffs, which hadn't gotten wet, and aimed myself toward the kitchen, looking for something to drink and munch on and smoke.

  The seaplane trip had been madness. The company pilots were obviously hired only after they'd completely failed any mental exam designed: they ran the gamut from the merely irresponsible to the totally schizophrenic. Today's sky jock had thought it amusing to "dive-bomb" any staidly flying smaller aircraft within visual range. We three passenger's had given up trying to convince him to cease these antics after he'd responded to our first try by declaring, "My wife left me this morning and took my only son! I have no reason to live!" So we three quietly shared a handful of Valium 10s, thinking that, at the least, fewer bones would break in the crash if we weren't Quite-So-Tense!

  Despite my calls, no one answered: I had the house to myself. I located, put together, and sipped a gin and tonic, found a lengthy roach of Matt's best Michoacán grass in an ashtray and lighted up, stripped to my briefs, and stepped out onto the little deck on the side off the kitchen.

  As a house, Withering Heights wasn't much: an early sixties cottage on stilts with a living room, dining room, kitchen, and master bedroom suite. Sometime later, another wing with two more bedrooms and bath had been added on the other side of the living room. This separation made it almost perfect for two "married" couples like ourselves to rent together. Even so, the rooms weren't large, nor were they well laid out, nor were they even particularly attractive. The walls were thin, storage space was barely adequate, kitchen and bathroom fixtures nothing to write home about, and those touches of "individuality" that had existed originally—artwork, throw pillows, curtains—were in such ghastly taste that after one exchanged look of horror, we instantly consigned them to a chest under the house uttering a collective sigh of relief.

  On the other hand, the location was perfection. The three-quarter wraparound deck provided a front view of the ocean, with intervening houses giving what the rental agent called "foreground definition." No matter, we saw enough of the ocean, and heard it clearly, constantly. The much wider side deck was hidden from neighbors, and from the boardwalk, behind fast-growing, unruly beach plum; away from the wind, it was ideal for sunning and eating. The narrow strip of back deck facing north was the real prize: it lofted so high above its surroundings that we had a truly spectacular 180-degree view—the entire community all the way east to the harbor, all the way west beyond the Burma Road.

  Included was a vast seascape of the Great South Bay, from the little beach at the end of our walk scarcely big enough to launch a few skiffs from, but six miles deep on the horizon to where Sayville glimmered during the day and glittered yellow and white at night.

  Back there, facing what promised to be a divinely multitonal sunset, I sat, nine-tenths naked, the crack of my ass athwart a railing some fifty feet above a sheer drop down to sand and a wind-twisted pine, puffing a joint and sipping my gin, wondering where the hell everyone was.

  A thumping sounded along Sky Walk: two people had just turned off the main walkway, Fire Island Boulevard, and had begun climbing the hill toward our house, though I couldn't from this angle make out who. Matt's steps were familiar to me, naturally: I'd often lain in bed editing copy or reading and listened to his approach. No. Not him. This must be...

  "Carajo! Just what I needed today! A nail in my foot!"

  ...Luis and Patrick! Out of their hands, two brown bags full of grocery shopping dropped onto Sky Walk, while Luis hopped around swearing and Patrick dashed in, tall and tan and distraught. "I need the first aid kit!"

  "Fuck that!" Luis shouted. "Get a hammer!"

  I found the tool, and Patrick dropped the first aid kit on the outdoor table and mimicked someone about to tear out his hair by the roots. Luis proceeded to hammer the nail so deep into the wood one couldn't see it.

  "The foot, Thor!" I said when he hobbled onto the deck. And when he'd lifted it onto the chair, I added, "What a baby! That's not bad. I'll fix it in a jiff."

  "Oh, honey," Luis sighed. "The day I've had you wouldn't believe!"

  "Have a joint!" I said. "Have a Valium! Have three!"

  "You're not even surprised to see me here?" Luis asked, as I disinfected and lightly wrapped his bruised toe. "Let me tell you why I'm not in the city. This guy, Sternmetz or whatever his name is, we're doing the humungous party for tonight? He comes by the place this morning and he asks to see everything. Then he says, 'You're not going to be there overseeing, are you?' And I said, 'Sure, why not?' Then he says he don't want no spies around. He calls me a spic! Me! I tell him I'm no spic, I'm a Cubano! My grandfather born in Spain, a hidalgo from Extremadura! You think he cares? If Tommy and Eloise hadn't been there, he would have walked out with a carving knife in his chest! Then... Thanks, hon, you're an— Wait a minute! Don't I get a lime wedge? That's better."

  When I could get a word in edgewise, I told Luis about my day. We all commiserated, and they went in to change for Tea Dance, leaving me on the side deck in a deck chair, by now, with grass on top of gin on top of those Valium, feeling little even recognizable as tension, never mind pain.

  The sky was doing something wispy and purply—what a display!—when Matt and Alistair arrived home.

  They were singing "My Girl," what sounded like the Rolling Stones'
rendition, and they were carrying a half dozen shopping bags between them.

  "You made it!" Matt Seemed surprised. He slid onto the deck chair and tried to nuzzle up to me. He had tequila on his breath and stared at the marks he'd made on my neck with apparent satisfaction.

  "Guess where we were!" Alistair asked, dropping the bags.

  "Harry Belafonte's Casa Calypso?" I ventured.

  "No, silly!"

  "At a fund-raiser for Tom Hayden given by Jane Fonda in complete Barbarella drag?" I tried.

  "Tea! And before Tea, shopping! Come! I'll show you what we bought."

  We trooped into the guest bedroom, where Alistair dumped the bags onto the double bed and began to display, explain, and try on each item. I noticed that they were well chosen, expensive as one could manage, and in the exactly correct colors and shades for his by-now-two-week-old tan.

  "You could wear this!" Alistair put the cotton sweater against my chest. "See, Matt! How good it looks. We have the same coloring. I'll bet you didn't know that when we were children, Rog and I were almost identical. I swear!"

  Luis and Patrick joined us long enough to ooh and ah sufficiently, then headed off to Tea, Luis complaining. "Not so fast. My poor toe."

  "Of course, I have better bones," Alistair said at the mirror.

  "More of them, certainly!" I added. "Especially in your head!"

  "Cunt!"

  That led to a pillow fight, which Matt was forced to break up by threatening spankings—"Yes! Spank me. Or better yet have the headmaster spank me!" Alistair shouted. I was dragged out of the room and told to change for Tea. Alistair threw a new sweater into my bedroom. "It's yours, Cuz."

  Fifteen minutes later, cleaned up, dressed, separated by Matt in the middle with an arm over each of our shoulders, yet not at all sobered up, we ascended the three steps to the Blue Whale, where Gloria Gaynor's cover of "Reach Out, I'll Be There" was tearing the place apart.

  Seeing us come up the stairs, Luis turned on his heel and said in an overly loud and desperate tone of voice, "Stop!"

  "...in the name of love!" we all three sang back, totally unprompted, complete with the extended halt gesture the Supremes had used.

  A round of applause greeted this arrival on the deck. Luis put a hand to his chest and said, "I've haven't been so moved at Tea since I heard that Spanish Anna walked into the surf wearing a nine-hundred-dollar Halston with a drink in each hand and was never seen again."

  Patrick guided us to the back bar, where Carlton Fuller, once and eternally the "Marlboro Man," though he never smoked a cigarette in his life, was just putting together one of the blue liquidities which were a specialty of the maison. He winked at Matt: we'd arrived!

  It had been a while since I'd been at Tea, never mind been there with Matt, who, on the other hand, did go fairly often. So I was somewhat surprised by how he'd managed to work out a way of dancing without moving that one foot at all. Evidently, Alistair was oblivious to the problem. I must have looked puzzled as I moved around my lover, because he suddenly caught me around the waist, lifted and dipped me, leaving me off balance and thus vulnerable.

  In those seconds before he hefted me back onto both of my feet, something passed between Matt's eyes and mine, although I wasn't certain then or afterward what exactly it signified.

  Jeffrey Roth, my dance buddy, appeared at that moment, as though out of thin air, and pulled me away from the others with his terpsichorean skill and sheer joi de danse. We continued dancing for several more cuts, long and short, even though I noticed the others leave the floor to go out onto the open deck. I had to beg Jeffrey to stop.

  As always in the ten minutes before Tea ended on a good-weather weekend eve, the place was completely jammed. Jeffrey pulled me over to the metal steps leading up to the Botel's upper floors, and we leaned and looked.

  "Congratulate me! I'm in lust!" he said.

  "You're always in lust," I said.

  "His name is Lawrence. Not Larry, Lawrence! He's an investment banker from Shaker Heights. He's got a washboard stomach, eyes the color of the Pacific in July, and the Dick of Death!"

  "So you're tinting your hair blond, having your tubes tied, and buying a new wardrobe from Bendel's before you move to Ohio."

  "You're just jealous! Who's the number dancing with your lover?"

  I stood up and peered in.

  "That's no number. That's my cousin Alistair."

  "That is a number, no matter who you claim he is. Look at his buns in those white ducks," Jeffrey said. "Like two babies fighting under a blanket. Not to mention the sublimity of his long, sun-streaked ash-blond hair falling over his sun-splashed cheeks and aristocratic nose."

  I looked again. All I saw was Alistair. "You're making that up."

  "Ex-cuse me!" Jeffrey grabbed a lad—Owen, known for giving blow jobs while humming Rossini's "Largo al Factotum"—and said, "Owen, see that one? Tallish, slender, blond with the ass and legs?"

  "Dancing with Matthew Loguidice?" Owen asked. (Everybody knew Matt.)

  "The same. Would you do it with him?"

  Owen pursed his lips and went "Mnmmm."

  "Get closer if you need to," Jeffrey suggested.

  Owen left the staircase and went inside. When he emerged, he gave a thumbs-up sign, stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth, and rolled his eyes.

  "What'd I tell you! Your cousin's a bona fide number!" "Pul-eeze! Owen would go down on a flagpole."

  "I'd watch your little country cousin," Jeffrey said. "Those types seem so innocent, until they get their claws into your man. Then..."

  I laughed. "You're way off, Alistair Dodge couldn't be more sophisticated. Or uninterested. He's nursing a broken heart from his divorce with one of the Bay Area's wealthiest heiresses."

  "In the immortal words of Maria Montez in Cobra Woman, 'I haff spo-ken!' "Jeffrey declared.'"Are we on for tomorrow at the Ice Palace? Say no and I'll have both your legs broken. Wait up, Owen. I've got to dance to this song or I'll scre-eam!"

  No one was answering the phone. So I did.

  I dragged my body out of bed and into the living room. Astonishment: it wasn't three in the morning. It was too bright for that, too sunny, too... What did the clock read? Ten? No! Impossible!

  "You sound three-quarters asleep," Marcy said on the other end.

  "I'm completely asleep. Where are you?"

  "In town. And I'm Nile green with envy. Is it as beautiful out there as I suspect it is?" she asked.

  "Scrumptious," I said, trying to focus on the deck.

  "Make that forest green with envy. Russian green. Crocodile gree—"

  "Hold on, will you? I'll move to the kitchen. Got to get coffee."

  "I'll call back when you're awake," Marcy said and hung up.

  I made an enormous Chemex of it, drank an entire mugful, and was carrying a second mug outside along the side deck, trying to shake myself into semiconsciousness, when I heard a voice from out of the guest bedroom.

  "That coffee I smell?"

  Alistair: awake.

  "Tons of it."

  "I don't think I can move. I danced so hard last night. You wouldn't bring in your cup so I could have a sip?"

  He sounded so pathetic I did as he asked. The bedroom appeared pretty much a-tumble. But while sleepy-looking, and with his hair swept up in six different directions at once, Alistair—nude but for a pair of pale-yellow briefs—certainly didn't look as terrible as he sounded. In fact, I was thinking, this divorce seemed to be doing at least his body some good. The last time I'd seen him this unclothed he'd been a bit zaftig.

  I perched on the edge of the mattress.

  "Now, don't tell me I should have been a good little boy like you last night," Alistair began.

  "Because I plotzed at dinner before even dessert?"

  "Because you stayed home and got beauty sleep. I do admire your stamina. Work your butt off all week, then out all weekend boogying. This coffee's good. I promise I'll get my own."

  "You better. You
've almost finished this."

  To my surprise, he threw an arm around my shoulder, drew me close, and rubbed his cheek against mine.

  I moved away, embarrassed, suspicious, and covered it by saying, "Please! Beard burn! What'll people say?"

  "I know what Matthew will say," Alistair said and leaned back on the pillow. "You know, I had no idea. Sim-ply had no i-dea!"

  I waited.

  "That Matthew was such a wonderful man!" Alistair explained. "I mean, I do have eyes, so I could see he was gorgeous. But... so bright and smart and sensitive... as though he reads your mind and then does exactly the right..." Alistair shook a finger at me. "You should have told me when I arrived that what I was wearing was... And Matthew's taste! You must trust him in everything! Simply everything!"

  "Almost everything," I demurred. "You stayed here last night? At the Sandpiper?"

  "No one goes to the Grove on a Friday night! We didn't get home till I don't know. Sunrise. God, this place is scrumptious! You're so lucky."

  "Tell me,"

  "I mean really lucky. I envy you."

  "If we were in China, now I'd have to disfigure myself so as to ward off evil spirits," I said.

  The phone rang again. Marcy: "We've got to talk seriously. Whatever did you do to Sydelle?"

  "Do?" I asked.

  "She said... It took me a half hour to get it out of her, she was so upset. I couldn't believe... She said... Well, really, Rog, I didn't expect this from you!"

  "Expect what?"

  "She said you humiliated her."

  "I saved her fucking article! Which was about to be thrown out."

  "Sydelle said your publisher told her you wanted it thrown out."

  Little two-timing creep—I'd stuff him inside his panda!

  "Marcy, listen..." I then explained the whole business.

  "I don't know," Marcy said. "I could understand Sydelle being upset about the way you two treated that hotel maid."

  "We were scum!" I admitted. "Journalists can be scum! She'd better get used to that if she's working with us."

  "Don't take it out on me," Marcy defended herself.