The Tall Boy

by Jess Gregg

  “Well, sure I did,” I told her. “Girls can be terrific fun. But as the feller says, ‘They’re not like the real thing.’”

  She wanted to know the difference I found between men and women. “Not anatomically,” she added quickly.

  I frowned thoughtfully, clearly a world-authority on this subject: women were probably more emotionally satisfying, I said, but men more exciting.

  She made a face at her teacup. “You’d find women more exciting if you knew how to excite them,” she said. “Most men don’t have the foggiest notion. I’m told that half the time, they rush right by it.”

  “Right by what?”

  “The key to the city,” she said. “The boy in the boat.”

  “Who?”

  Her smile was mysterious, but for once she spoke out plainly. I had never heard of the clitoris before, although my fraternity brothers at college had spelled out everything they had discovered in the course of intensive investigation. “But maybe they didn’t know about it either,” Marty said. “After all, it takes a woman to know what pleases a woman.”

  We learned lots of things from each other, that spring. Yet coincident with this, we began to find costs we had never anticipated—odd little instances of possessiveness, subtle shows of jealousy. These appeared, faded, and took shape again, like the gray cat blending in and out of sight against our blue walls. In April, it suddenly leapt out into full view, when Mary Sullivan, my longtime playmate from the Waldorf-Astoria book shop, finally tracked me down. “Why don’t you get a telephone?” she cried. “I’ve been trying to reach you for months.”

  Mary never met anyone she didn’t like, and had an immediate hug for Marty. Her house-warming presents were quickly put to use—she emptied the pint of whiskey into glasses, passed around the bargain fruit, and cleared a place on our bureau for the photograph of herself in black tie at a costume ball. “Everyone was there, darling,” she told me. “Everyone we know.”

  She chattered on vivaciously, scattering names I had almost forgotten, evoking the kind of hectic fun that was her specialty. Only after a while did I become aware of Marty’s smoldering silence. Her eyes fired up every time Mary said we. I called her on it when our guest left. “Well, you were just as bad,” Marty cried. “Hovering over us, like you were afraid she and I would like each other better than we do you.”

  “Hovering!” I cried. “The hell I did!”

  “The hell you didn’t!”

  I expect we got rather noisy about it, because the people downstairs began tapping their ceiling with a broomstick. Worse, she hit me, and I hurled one of her shoes out the window. I was repentant the next day, and when she got home from work, I had some jonquils for her on our bathtub table. She in turn gave me a new typewriter ribbon, and to prove she wasn’t even remotely possessive, brought a big-eyed young man from her office, and left us alone while she fixed coffee. I was touched by her generosity, but only the typewriter ribbon was ever put to use.

  Things never did get any less complex for Marty and me. “Molly and me,” I almost said. And probably should add, as the song does, “and baby makes three.” Whether she actually got pregnant, I still don’t know for sure. Marty, being Marty, kept it all to herself. In retrospect, however, I realize she and I hadn’t been particularly careful in our midnight happenstance—consequences was still the most obscure word in gay vocabularies. On that morning in June, when everything started falling apart, the most important thing on my mind was our decision to paint over our gloomy blue walls. We had just finished stirring up the pigment when she faltered and laid down her brush. “I’m simply not sure this is what I want,” she said, as if to herself.

  I thought she was talking about the new color, just an ordinary off-white we had decided upon earlier. She gazed over my shoulder for a long time, however, and then lay down on her bed, murmuring that the paint fumes had given her a headache. During the afternoon, she went upstairs to borrow an aspirin from Miss Squire.

  When she hadn’t returned by dinner, I climbed up to the top floor. The old nurse had her lying down with a white cloth on her brow, and was fanning her. “Touch of the flu,” Miss Squire said crisply. She saw me looking at the wicker suitcase of potions and pills lying open and plundered on the floor. “I’ve given her some medicine,” she explained. “Strong old-time stuff, but she’ll be ship-shape tomorrow.”

  Actually, it was over two weeks before Marty was herself again. But in a sense, she never again was the Marty I knew. If it had been a miscarriage rather than flu, or if Miss Squire’s old-time pills had terminated a pregnancy, I do not know, but it’s no play on words to say something had gone out of Marty. Maybe what she had lost was the far-out hope that going straight would set her life right. More and more often now, I found her gazing out of the window at nothing. The poems she had spent so many hours working on were put away, nothing left of them but the tense look she got when a line wouldn’t scan. I could still get her to smile sometimes, and once in a while, to laugh, but when she woke up in despair at night, she no longer turned to me for comfort.

  I began to look behind her explanations when she started coming home from work late. “There was no way to let you know in advance,” she’d say. We still had no telephone, and whenever she had to call her parents in Galveston, it meant going several blocks to the Rexall drugstore. Lately, she had felt the impulse to talk to them often, and sometimes was gone for an hour. One night, I followed her. She didn’t stop at any Rexall drugstore. Where she stopped was a handsome brownstone on West Tenth Street. When she disappeared inside, I waited a moment, then went into the foyer, and checked the nameplates of the tenants. A temporary card said Lundy, as somehow I knew it would.

  It didn’t matter to me. I told myself so, several times. It was to be expected, the same with me as with her—high time for each of us to stop hiding, and get back to our real lives. On the way home, I circled Sheridan Square once or twice, then resolutely sat down on a bench. A choice was available: a student from the campus at Washington Square pretending to read under a streetlight, and on a bench near mine, a blond young man lazily patting his pockets for a match, always a good come-on. I ended up with neither of them. A cop was pacing up and down in front of the little Square. He wasn’t watching me, or them either, and yet his presence under these circumstances triggered a reaction over which I had no control. Even as my heart began to hammer, I got up and hastened away.

  My flight seemed foolish by the time I got back to the apartment. Just as foolish, but not as quickly acknowledged, was my resentment of Marty for snapping out of her nightmare while I was still trapped in mine. I pretended to be sleeping when she came in, shortly after; and might as well have been asleep when we saw each other the next day. We didn’t really talk at all until late the third night, when I woke up to find her sitting on the edge of my bed. “Can I crawl in?” she whispered.

  I moved over. “We’ve been so silent lately,” she continued, when she lay beside me, “and what I wanted to tell you is, I do care for you.”

  I wasn’t very receptive. “Yeah?”

  She nodded. “Maybe it doesn’t always look that way, but I do. I think we both do. We love each other a little. It’s just that we’re not—y’know—in.”

  “In?”

  “In love. But that’s all right, isn’t it? In isn’t what I want anymore. It hasn’t ever made me happy. In is what I cut my wrist with. But caring, like you and I do—not owning each other, not hurting each other—that’s what I want most now.”

  She had never spoken this openly to me, and some kind of embarrassment robbed me of what I wanted to tell her. Only as she was about to get out of bed was I able to blurt, “What about her?”

  She turned back. “Lundy?”

  I nodded.

  “Yes, I’ve seen her,” she admitted. “But really seen her, this time. Seen through that whole obsessive thing. It’s—” She took a deep breath. “—out of my system for good.”

  “Then—you won’t be mo
ving out?”

  “I won’t be going anywhere,” she promised.

  But two days later, she had vanished, and Lundy too.

  11

  THE SECURITY GOD

  I knew the risk, but after all, I wasn’t really following him—merely going in the same direction. He strode down lower Fifth Avenue, then turned at Eighth Street, and went into the Tip-Top diner. I continued on my way, walking clear to Sixth Avenue before I decided to have another cup of coffee after all. Returning to the Tip-Top, I sat down at the counter next to him and ordered. Even to my own ears, my voice sounded funny.

  I was too wise to look at him directly, but whenever I could, I sneaked a glance at his reflection in the mirror behind the counter. He was about thirty-three, but had kept the look that distinguished tramp athletes at college. He didn’t talk like a college man, however, so it was probably just the result of wearing chinos instead of denims, and cropping his hair short. His sleeves were rolled up for work, and disclosed a tattoo on his forearm. It would have been easy to ask him to pass the sugar, and springboard this into a conversation. But I couldn’t. I didn’t try to scrape acquaintance with good-looking strangers anymore. I’d had one surprise too many.

  He finished his breakfast before I did, and stood up. “Take care, Elsie,” he called to the waitress. I glimpsed the tip he left her by his saucer.

  The waitress, a tall stick-shaped woman with tightly rolled curls, saw it too and suddenly showed a crowd of teeth. “Aw, you didn’t have to do that, Harree.”

  He smiled at her gravely, and went to the door. “See you tomorrow.” This was revealing—his seriousness, his generosity, and especially the fact that he would be back the next day. Not that this mattered, since I had no plan of carrying it any further. Even so, I found myself using tricks to find out who he was. “That guy who just left,” I said to Elsie. “Isn’t that Harry Nowak? Used to be with Con-Edison?”

  Her accent was pure New Yorkese. “Naw, that’s Harry Shaugnessy, he’s a coppenter. Moonlights as a security god.”

  I liked the image of this—a god of security! And by moonlight! The picture stayed with me all day, and teased me back to the Tip-Top for breakfast the next morning. Yet neither then, nor on subsequent days, was I able to break through my inhibition.

  I was less guarded with the other regulars at the diner, however, and managed to ease out some more information about him. He had been in the army. He was separated from his wife. He was troubled with headaches, and Elsie kept aspirin in the cash register for him. She had a crush on him, but not everyone else was so admiring. The short-order cook dismissed him as an oddball. And possibly Harry was a bit odd—most of the people I was drawn to were. That way, I didn’t stand out so glaringly myself.

  Sometimes I’d see him on the street. Once, I brushed by him in the hardware store. Other people had no trouble approaching him. Bums and beggars made a bee-line for him. I was impressed by his patience and willingness with them. Even when he had no money to give, he seemed to reimburse them with his attention. I used to try to imitate this manner—would confront myself in the mirror when I was shaving, and speak as straightforwardly to my reflection as he did to the beggars. “If I had any dough, just now,” he’d tell them, “I’d sure as hell shoot it to you.”

  Bit by bit, I put together a pretty clear picture of Harry. It was myself who remained unknown. I had grown more and more withdrawn, especially after Marty had moved out of our blue apartment. When loneliness finally got too much for me, I moved across the Village to a brownstone on University Place, where I was more likely to meet people. My one-room apartment was elegant in a dilapidated way—marble fireplace that didn’t work, and tall casement windows stuck shut—but the loneliness persisted. Sometimes, in desperation, I went to the bars on nearby Eighth Street—Mary’s and the Old Colony—but if anyone spoke to me, that obsessive fear of being entrapped by police decoys returned, and I left. My funds were dwindling fast now, and unwilling to ask my family for a loan, I spent longer hours each day at my typewriter trying to get my novel finished. The few people I saw were elderly. My landladies, the Misses Emma and Harriet Mittelstaedt, had me in for tea occasionally. And sometimes I went to Number One Fifth Avenue to visit the illustrator, Majeska, whom my agent had introduced me to. Her color plates for the books of Isak Dinesen were moody and haunted, intricate as cobwebs, but she herself was resolutely down to earth. Born Henrietta Stern some seventy years before, she spoke in a flat Philadelphia voice, and even when she had guests, continued to paint in bed undistracted. “How old are you?” she demanded one night, not looking up from her work.

  “Twenty-five.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you that you’re wasting your youth?” she asked, bluntly. “Always by yourself, always alone.”

  I tried to pass it off as a joke. “It’s safer.”

  “How do you mean?” she asked, peering at me now through her gold Harlequin glasses. “How do you mean, safer?”

  For an instant, I longed to tell her and get it out in the open—the shame at having been arrested, the dread of it happening again. Yet not even the promise of sympathy or relief could make me speak of it. Not to her, not to anyone.

  “Whatever it is, I wish you’d snap out of it,” she continued. “You’re beginning to look old and sound paranoid. Kick over a trace or two, for God’s sake! Get out in the fresh air, meet someone your own age.”

  If I had known how to, I would have. Instead, I kept on as I was, half-prisoner, half-guard. My irresolute attempt to cultivate Harry was as far as I seemed able to go. But that was before I cut through Washington Square after a late movie one night. The paths were dark there, and lovers strolled together, or searched for each other as yet unfound. It was always a temptation to slow down, and at least see who was there. But I never did—the hurried footfall of a policeman reminded me why. He paid no attention to me, but swung by as if going for help. I sensed tension and alarm, even before I saw Harry hastening toward me. He was carrying someone, the body slackly outstretched across his arms, and as he strode by, he must have recognized me, for he said curtly, “Get his sack.”

  Thinking there had been an accident, I quickened my pace, and found a knapsack lying overturned by a bench. Snatching it up, I ran back along the path, and caught up with Harry just as he cut across the lawn and pushed into a clump of bushes. Paying no attention to me, he laid the body down on the ground. The body sat up uncertainly. It was a young black man, Watusitall and visibly disoriented. When he tried to stand, his long legs buckled, and he sprawled forward helplessly. “Take it easy,” Harry whispered, and held him down. Scraping together a pile of dead leaves with his free hand, he heaped them over the black man’s body. “Don’t move,” he warned. Then he headed back to the path, running bent over.

  I did the same. We reached the street about the time the policeman, flanked by another, marched into the Square and up the path. “They won’t find him,” Harry whispered with satisfaction.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Some poor junkie,” he said. “Too doped up to run off when the cop went for back-up. So I hid him.”

  “Someone you know?” I asked. He shook his head. “Then why bother?”

  “Well, hell!” His eyes met mine sharply. “Think I was goin’ to leave him there for the Law?”

  I thought about it all the way home—lay in bed for a long time, wondering. It was more than his put-down of the police that intrigued me. I was too insecure to believe in anything but ulterior motives, yet I wanted to think that some kind of compassion for the damned really existed. In view of Harry’s attitude toward beggars, his gallantry to gawky Elsie, and this unassuming kindness to the cokehead, he seemed to me an odd blend of Don Quixote, St. Francis, and Mr. America.

  Finding him in the Tip-Top the next morning, I sat down beside him and said hello, just as if that were something I had always done before. He gave me a wink to acknowledge that we had shared some mischief the night before, though he didn�
�t seem much interested in hashing it over again. The past had passed—a new idea for me—and he was much more interested in what was happening today. On that morning, and the ones following, I found myself discussing things with him that had never particularly interested me before: the pennant, City Hall, Belmont. He liked the track, and once we went there together—I even won a few dollars. Another day, he turned up with two little girls in plaid parochial jumpers, nieces of his, he said, whom he was taking to the zoo in Central Park. I tagged along. One Sunday, he and I took Elsie down to the Battery, and looked out over the water to the Statue of Liberty. I teased her because she was so moved by the experience. Harry smiled at me kind of shame-facedly, and showed me his bare arm. It was all goose-bumps.

  I could scarcely believe the way my life was opening up again. The journal I kept began to spill over with conversations with Harry, and descriptions of where we went, what we did. In re-reading it now, I seemed especially surprised that it was not just me seeking him out, but him so often reaching out to me. It was his seeming approval that I could not quite figure. I kept asking myself if it was merely the same consideration he showed all the other misfits, or was he somehow attracted to me? I could not really believe this last. It felt too much like wishful thinking. He looked so straight. That wedding ring on his finger seemed such a final statement, even though I knew he was separated from his wife. He mentioned her a few times. She lived in Jersey, he said, and they had a nine-year-old girl. He was frank about everything, yet I always ended up not knowing what I wanted to know.

  My uncertainty about him came to a startling head on the day he asked me to help him with a job in Brooklyn. “It’s a long ride, and not much pay, but we’ll split even, okay?”