So that was why he'd saddled me with Horace tonight. To keep me occupied while he put the final make on Matt. "It's not my decision. Talk to—"
"I have. Not in so many words. I merely suggested abroad. Doriot's abandoning our place in France. A month or two in Paris. A few side trips to meet editors, to slip Matthew into the right salons..."
Hearing that made me suddenly cold.
So even before tonight, it had all been decided between them, and my part, my decision, was merely ornamental—or to make them feel they'd done the right thing.
But wait! What if Alistair were wrong? What if I'd not harmed Matt but helped him? What if he'd not been trapped because of me and my career, but because of his own needs and desires, his own decisions?
Despite being so high, I was cogitating, formulating some way to offer all these arguments, when a quartet of Scarletts and Jezebels entered the room, giggling and chatting. I began to rise from the vanity stool, but as though intuiting my change of mind, Alistair held me down.
"You mustn't fail Matthew now, Rog. He needs you more than ever now to do what you know in your heart is right for him."
Staring at my own suddenly estranged and conflicted face in those three mirrors, I barely heard his whispered words through the chatter and the loud rustling of silk and taffeta around me.
"I know he can count on you," Alistair sighed. He stood up to leave.
I had to stop him. Stop him and stop Matt from leaving!
"Wait just one minute!" I said.
"You girls done in here?" one queen in pink crinoline asked petulantly.
"We're not done," I said, irked by his tone of voice. "And if you want to go back to the party with any hair left on your skull, you'd better get out right now. Alistair, stay right where you are!"
"But, Cuz..."
"All of you!" I shouted, knocking aside the leg of one queen who'd dropped into full lolling upon the bed. "That means you too, Melanie."
"Pushy bitch!" he said, getting up.
"Overweight! Overdressed!" I retorted, shoving her out the door. And turned to Alistair.
"I might be having trouble with my lover, and I might be stoned on MDA, but believe me, I see exactly what you're up to."
His lipsticked mouth puckered in surprise.
"...And what you've been up to since the minute you arrived at the Island with Hugger and Mugger in that beat-up old tug."
"Exactly what do you me—"
"What I mean is that for all the money from your settlement and all the fancy and titled friends you've collected and all your many many experiences in world travel, the minute you got here, you saw what your poor little cousin had and you turned fucking forest-green with envy. You're the one who insisted on marrying a woman even though you knew it was going to be nearly impossible to pull off. And now that it's failed, as it had to, you have the nerve to come here and try to break up my marriage."
"If it's solid," Alistair sneered, "I couldn't even try to break—"
"Who in hell gave you the right to make that decision? I never did. I never heard Matt do it. From the moment you got here and saw us together, you were bent on breaking us up."
"You can't bear that Matt would come with me, can you?" Alistair asked. And just then, someone stepped into the doorway dressed as Judy Garland from Meet Me in St. Louis. Without a glance, Alistair shoved him out the door.
"I've got to pee," the lad protested.
"Use the sink!" Alistair yelled and slammed the door shut.
"I can bear it!" I said. "Let Matt go to Europe with you. I'm not afraid. Let him go to Patagonia with you! To the planet Saturn, for that matter! It doesn't mean anything! It doesn't mean he'll ever sleep with you."
"Oh, please!" Alistair scoffed. "You're becoming infantile."
"And even if he should happen to sleep with you, it still won't mean anything. And even if, after years and years, it happens to come to mean something, it will still never mean what Matt and I mean to each other, even when we haven't seen each other for days, even when we're fighting each other tooth and nail."
"You admit your relationship is crumbling?"
"I admit nothing. The truth, Alistair, is that no matter what you do, you'll still never know the intimacy we've had, even in our worst moments."
"It's crumbling! This is your final pathetic attempt to hold onto shreds of dignity!"
"The truly surprising thing, Alistair, is that with your IQ and after all these years, you don't have a clue to what really counts in life, do you?"
"Pathetic and not even worth comment if it weren't for— I said stay out!" Alistair slammed the door shut again.
"But that's not what bothers you, Alistair. What bothers you is that you realize that it's all over for you. You already attained what puny little peak was destined to be your acme years ago! At twenty-four? At sixteen? And it's all been downhill since, hasn't it?"
"We'll see what my acme is when Matthew is a world-famous poet at my side!"
"Maybe even earlier. At nine, when you still had a complexion! When exactly did you pitch a perfect no-hitter Softball game? 1954?"
"I'll show you!" Alistair shouted.
"Not the face! Anything but the face!" I shouted back, still in character. But I watched him pick up and throw a heavy bronze box straight at me. Not only that, but the fucker managed to slip out of the room while I was busy cowering from the missile he'd launched. Meanwhile it smashed into the wall with enough force to leave a good-sized dent and to break a hinge. Luckily it missed the triple mirrors, or I might have been picking glass out of my flesh for weeks.
By the time I was congratulating myself on emerging unscathed, more costumed party guests, including the previous Southern belles and some seriously post-teen "fans," had pushed into the bedroom and headed for the mirrors, the vanity, and the loo, all of them commenting on how rudely Alistair had behaved.
"The worst is," one said, "I couldn't tell whether that deranged queen was supposed to be Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey or Veronica Lake in I Married a Witch.'"
"More like Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth! And I do mean awful!"
I, however, managed to calm myself down. As I exited the bedroom and sailed into the living room, I heard two acquaintances:
"He looks good, doesn't he?" Scott Jacobsen said behind my back.
"As I've always said, my dear," Bob Brasswell replied, "beauty is all a matter of lighting and distance."
"But he was only inches away! And the lighting here is fatal!"
I was still laughing over that exchange when a few minutes later I emerged from the house and found Horace Brecker III awaiting me.
He seemed breathless, eager: evidently lighting and distance were all in my favor as he looked up and saw me. I knew then that the MDA, "the love drug," he'd taken had achieved its eponymous effect on him: Horace was smitten with me—me and no one else but me.
I now faced a choice: I could ease him off, try to dance him into the ground, leave him exhausted and good for nothing but a full day of sleep—or I could give Horace exactly what he thought he wanted and let him worry about what he'd done.
I was still unsure whether or not Alistair wanted Horace seduced. Would it provide some arcane revenge on Doriot? Or would it thoroughly piss off Alistair that I'd gotten to this "straight" man when he clearly hadn't? Pissing off Alistair was my only aim now.
"I thought you'd left," Horace said, and the way that he said it— half-pathetically, half-challengingly—instantly, irrevocably, decided my course.
"That's what I wanted you to think," I teased.
"Don't be mean," he pleaded, taking me by the arm.
"You're so strong! So determined!"
"I am determined."
As we moved away from the door, Horace suddenly flattened me against the wall of the house. He covered me with his body as he nibbled and kissed my neck and ear and nose and lips, breathing into my ear.
He was so far gone he didn't care about making a public spectacle.
"I paid the boat's captain to ship off soon as we're aboard," he said.
This was getting intriguing. Should I turn him into a public love-slave and throw that into Alistair and Matt's faces?
Without waiting for a response, Horace began tongue-kissing me with such fervor and in such depth, I thought I'd pass out from lack of oxygen. When, after some time, he finally retracted his prehensile tongue from thoroughly exploring and simultaneously ravishing every square inch of my glottal insides, he said, "Promise you won't say no!"
"But, Horace," I managed to moan through the continuing palpable steam of his coruscating passion.
"Oh... Babe," he protested back, as his hands seemed to double then triple in number and at the same time slide in through every possible entry and exit, front and back, of my borrowed blue shot-silk dress, "...you've... got me... so..."
"But, Horace!" I continued in that same tone of voice, which anyone over nine years old and not MDA'ed to the kazoo would instantly have recognized as being as fake as Mother's rhinestones, "are you sure you want to do this?"
Another ten fingers emerged from nowhere to slip into my panties and fondle me.
"Oh... Babe, I have to have you tonight. I won't be stopped by anything. By anybody."
"So you spent the night with Horace," Wally said. "And I suppose you're proud of that."
"Not really," I quickly said.
That was untrue, naturally, but in the months we'd been together I'd discovered that Wally (like so many of his generation) possessed an ethical system astonishingly more rigid than my own (or that of my flower children generation); a system wherein a deed like screwing with a straight boy was not only not the turn-on, subversion, and giggle I considered it, but also somewhat suspect. Suspect of, if not "internalized homophobia," then at least a Serious Lack of Seriousness.
Wally and I had exited Central Park, crossed CPW, and walked a block and a half. We were a few doors from Alistair's building.
"So what happened to Alistair and Matt?"
"We're here!" I announced, aiming myself at the building foyer.
Wally held me back. "Tell me!"
"Later. Why, don't we deal with this mess now?"
"One answer! No, two!" Wally corrected.
"Okay!" Wally had now opened himself up to being annoyed on my terms. "Horace Brecker III turned out to be a terrific lay. Partly, I suspect, out of a month or so of horniness, partly out of drug-induced passion. We made love for hours while the yacht circled eastern Long Island, and when the MDA wore off, we passed out completely. We didn't return to the Pines for over thirty-six hours, and when we did, Horace packed up and jetted to San Francisco the next day. There, after a scandalously short time, he proposed to that woman he'd been seeing for years. And she accepted. No, he and I never saw each other again, although he did send me a note thanking me, saying not only that he never once regretted what we'd done, but that the night had been exactly the kick he needed to convince him to settle down once and for all."
"Jes-us!" Wally said. "Heterosexuals are crazy."
I let that pass: to me gays had always seemed at least equally gaga.
"And Matt?" Wally insisted.
"They went to Europe, just as Alistair said they would. Both were gone by the time Horace and I returned. Without even leaving a note. Of course I thought I'd hear from one or the other soon enough. But it was two months before, one day at work, the Grunt rather sheepishly asked for the keys to my apartment. Matt had empowered him to collect his things, to pack and ship overseas."
"So you didn't quit the magazine as you threatened?"
"Did too!" I defended myself. "Right after the holidays, when I had what I considered enough savings plus a bonus. It was another half year before I even had to think of money again."
"Did Alistair make Matt a literary lion in Europe as he said he would?"
"For a while... after a fashion.... Matt was published in a few quarterlies in Paris and London. He did a poem suite in Paris Vogue with photographs by Helmut Newton, which wasn't too shabby. He appeared with an interpreter on 'Apostrophes,' the Frogs' so-called intellectual TV show. But that was about it! The poetry didn't cross to the States until some time after I'd left Manifest, when Harte finally published Matt's poems.
"I never found out what happened, whether Alistair and Matt disagreed on the next step in Matt's career, or whether they developed personal disagreements, or if Matt suddenly felt that he'd sold out. After a year or so, even those few mentions and photos of him in foreign magazines stopped. I knew from friends that Alistair and Matt were no longer seen in each other's company. No surprise, given how hardheaded both of them were.
"Alistair returned here, then to L.A. Matt stayed in Europe and moved to Italy, modeling for Armani in Milan for a while. There was talk of him dating another model, some Brit who people said resembled me. But I never confirmed the rumor—or checked out the model. However, over the next year or so I'd never open Esquire or GQ and come upon Matt's photo without having one emotion or another. Usually when I came upon his photo, I'd simply be irritated the rest of the day, but one time—you're going to laugh—I didn't even recognize Matt in the picture at first, given the way he was dressed and posed, but I got a hard-on, a real diamond-cutter!" ,
Wally didn't laugh. Neither, however, did he seem upset. "And that was it?" he asked. "You never saw Matt again?"
"Once, at the Pines. It was a late Sunday afternoon, and I'd been visiting someone who parked his ketch there. I was opposite the restaurant and shops and disco. Across the water, I saw these three guys come out of Bay Walk next to the Pines Pantry. Two of them looked European. Older. It took a minute for me to recognize Matt as the third. His hair was long, past his shoulders. He'd shaved off all facial hair. He was wearing a loose turtle-neck top and baggy linen trousers. His face looked, I don't know, harder, more adult somehow. Maybe because, as predicted, he'd lost his foot."
"You mean he...?"
"...wore a prosthetic. I couldn't see it clearly, but he was walking with a cane. It was from how he walked and leaned on it that I could tell."
As I spoke, I remembered how stunned I'd been when I'd seen Matt that day at the Pines. How I'd been so elated to see him I'd lifted one hand and opened my mouth to shout across the harbor slip for his attention. Then Matt had moved, walked maybe three steps, and I'd seen and instantly known his foot had been taken off. My shout died in my mouth, an expanding blue balloon fizzling,
"Did he confirm it?" Wally asked.
"I... I couldn't talk to him," I admitted.
"Because he wasn't perfect anymore?"
"Because I knew if we'd stayed together, he'd still have had his foot."
"That's medically ridiculous!"
"I know."
"And that was the last you saw him? Then you'd heard that he died?"
"Well...," I hedged. Hoping to change the subject, I went on. "I did see Alistair again, when he moved back to the city. Wally? Can we go up now?"
That distracted him.
"What exactly are you going to do up there? What do you want me to do?"
"I'm not sure, Wals. Support me with the White Woman."
"A cinch!"
And then, before he let me go, Wally said in a different tone of voice, "Thanks for telling me all about you and Matt."
"Do you feel better about him now?"
"This may sound weirdso, but I feel like we would have gotten along if we'd ever met."
"Right," I said. Perhaps it was my own ego-generated shortsightedness, but I had this terrible feeling that each of them was so self-involved, they would have totally ignored each other, or at the most, brushed each other off.
"Gird your loins," I cheer-led. "We've got Dorky to deal with!"
"Where are loins exactly?" Wally asked. "And what precisely does it mean to gird them? To use a girdle, or...? What are you muttering, Rog?"
The outer glass door was locked. We had to stand there and knock and gesticulate and mak
e stupid faces to get the attention of the nighttime lobby attendant. And when he did finally deign to tear himself away from his magazine long enough to peer at us, he turned out to be someone I didn't know.
"Oh great! A stranger!"
The magazine dangling from one large, hairy, pale hand was Health and Fitness, a Spandex-clad couple—overoiled and overmuscled— prominent on the cover, throwing "show" poses at each other among cutouts of giant oranges and lemons, doubtless in citric reverence of Florida. The lobby attendant was white, young, with a square head, big shoulders, and that specific kind of thick neck only found on obvious fans of bodybuilding. I assumed he was an incessant masturbator. His first response to us was that universal shrug denoting "What's up?"
I gestured for him to unlock one or more of the several glass doors separating us. When he'd disappeared and appeared again with a medieval chatelaine's set of variously sized keys, managed to get a few doors open, and was flat against the final glass separating us, he shouted, "What do you want?"
"To get in and see someone!"
"At...?" checking his watch, "four-fifty A.M.?"
"That is what you're here for, isn't it?" I shouted back. "To let people in."
"Who you seem'?" He was looking us over, Wally and me, sizing us up but not giving away his evaluation. Were we dangerous? I couldn't tell what he'd concluded, until he suddenly opened up and let us into the outer foyer.
I said my cousin. It was something of an emergency.
Exactly the wrong move: he grew instantly suspicious. "What kind of emergency?"
I'd been phoning and not been able to reach my cousin all night.
"They had a party. Till late," he explained. "Might have had the phone off the hook."
"We were at the party," I explained back. "Left early."
"It's over." He shrugged. "You got a key to the apartment?"
"Not with me."
"You sure they're expecting you?" he interrogated.
"Yes," I lied.
"No!" Wally told the truth.
"You expect me to wake them up?"
That was exactly what I expected.
"You're living in a fantasy!"
Like People in History Page 45