The Tall Boy

by Jess Gregg

  “—Would we be more comfortable, having our coffee in the living room?” Sharlie was asking the lawyer.

  “Could be,” he said, “but if we’re going to read the will now, it might be more convenient to sit here around the table.” He glanced from face to face, and when there was no objection, reached for his document case.

  His voice, mellifluous in conversation, leveled into monotone as he began reading my father’s last wishes aloud. I listened to the dense legalese, already predicting what most of the bequests would be—provisions for his great-grandchildren’s education, a generous remembrance to Alberta for her loving care, a fund for the college. Only my own position remained obscure to me. I did not look up from my hands, but was aware of my sisters’ secret glances at me, perhaps reassuring, perhaps commiserating.

  The lawyer’s voice picked up color as he came to the major bestowals, and I told myself defiantly that I didn’t care how it turned out. Still, I was holding my breath. I knew I could survive even if my father didn’t mention me at all. The hardship would be in living with the final knowledge of his rejection.

  And then the lawyer’s voice said it, proof that Dean B. had shown more faith in me than I had in him. He had left his estate equally divided, bequeathing me a third of everything.

  The self-reproach that shot through me then took aim again during the afternoon; while my sisters and I were going through the filing cabinets in his study, I came across an entire drawer marked with my household name, Bud. All my letters were in it, from the one I had written to him just two weeks earlier, back to the semi-suicidal scrawl from summer camp, my first time away from home. There was a gradation of snapshots of me as I grew up, most of them looking like taffy drawn out. My report cards were there too, a sheaf of drawings, an early story. Noo, glancing at my face, asked, “Why should this surprise you?”

  I shook my head, unable to explain.

  She resumed sorting through a pile of papers. “You two were so alike in that way, at least,” she mused. “He always had trouble expressing what he felt too. Not what he thought, but what he felt.”

  She got to talking about those months after our mother died, when he just sat there, day after day, neatly dressed and unfailingly polite, laying out spreads of double solitaire on the dining table. Then suddenly, he had snapped out of it—broke through that barrier of reserve that had constrained him all his life. “I suddenly realized that whatever I missed in your mother, I myself could be,” he told Noo. “That wonderful enthusiasm of hers—when I missed it, I could be it. Her warmth and thoughtfulness: I could be warm and thoughtful. Her humor, her imagination, her sympathy. I could be all these qualities, and she would exist in me, as me.”

  The thought that swept through me surprised me: I wish I had known that man!

  That same thought came to me a day later, and then frequently. During the month it took my sisters and me to sort through the house and close it up, I finally began to read him. It was such a rich time, I was sorry to bring it to an end, but I had left someone in New York, and it was time to get back to him. There was no possible way to explain this to Sharlie and Noo so I told them I had to get back to my work. Only as I was packing my suitcase did it occur to me that this was the excuse I had always used to keep my father from knowing too much about me. “Sorry I can’t talk now, Dean B., I’ve got to get back to work.” “Love to see you, Dad, but I can’t leave my work just now.”

  Yet why such secrecy had seemed so important to me, I could no longer explain. This man I had begun to know surely would have found some understanding for me too. It even seemed probable he had known all about me anyway, and had waited with tact and forbearance for some indication that it was all right to acknowledge it.

  A suspicion began to sneak up on me that, in all my life, I had never been myself with the people who meant the most to me. I had kept them strangers, and myself a stranger to them. And worse, I was intending to go on doing this as long as I lived. The alternative was just too risky. If I confessed I was gay to Noo, the gentler of my sisters, she might understand—but suppose she didn’t? Suppose I saw hurt in her eyes, or distaste? And Sharlie, closest friend of my childhood—could I spare her now if she turned away? I knew I couldn’t; felt again, as I had felt my whole life, that secrecy was safer, at least with the family.

  Shutting my suitcase, I went downstairs. Yet as I passed Dean B.’s study, empty now except for packing crates, I suddenly knew how he would react to my cautious reasoning. “Balls!” he would say. And for that moment, anyway, I knew I had them. I could hear the murmur of my sisters chatting on the screen porch, waiting to drive me to the airport. I glanced at my watch. There was time, and I set down my suitcase. “Hey, girls,” I called, hearing Dean B.’s inflection in my voice, “would you step into the office—?”

  21

  LO

  A glance at each other as we passed on the street was introduction enough. I looked back at him, and he was looking back at me, a tall kid with big shoulders and wide, gentle eyes. His light brown hair wasn’t forever, but his complexion was fresh and his mouth vividly red. Twenty-two or twenty-three years old, I judged—far too young for me. In my forties now, I was a lot more comfortable with tricks nearer my own age.

  I walked on. I started to anyway, but the image of those shoulders and that coloring forced me to look back again. His smile was direct and boyish. I hesitated, but a moment later, we were walking side by side. As we reached my door, I spoke for the first time. “Like to come up?”

  Lo

  “All right.”

  It was our last conversation for an hour, maybe two—time doesn’t register in bed. “I’ve got to get along,” he finally said. But he kept turning back to study a tattered old French poster I had pinned to my wall. “Like it?” I asked. He nodded, and correctly identified the graceful dancer pictured there: Cleo de Merode. “How did you know that?” I demanded.

  “Because she posed for Degas and Lautrec,” he said. “And I’m an artist too.” He beamed like some patriot promoting his homeland: “An impressionist.”

  I showed him my other posters from that era—the writer, Colette, skimming along like an ice skater, the heartless Otero flinging about in all her jewels, and a dazzling mid-air celebration of cough lozenges by Cheret. We swapped the kind of story that collectors torment themselves with—once I had allowed fifty dollars to stand between me and a torn, but genuine Lautrec poster; once, he had had a chance to buy a color etching by Mary Cassatt for next to nothing, and let it get away. We discovered other interests in common too, and found that we laughed at the same sort of thing. Both of us were surprised to notice it had gotten dark outside. I suggested we have some dinner at a nearby pasta place, and later walked him to his digs down near the Holland Tunnel. A tiny warren of rooms in a crumbling brick building served as his studio, bunkhouse, and catch-all. The furniture was old, crowded together and nearly buried under clothes, art supplies, and great billowing plants. Everywhere I turned there were paintings, raw and unframed—orchards, sky-drifts, flowering hillsides. I particularly liked a chalk drawing of red and purple anemones, and he gave it to me.

  We saw each other the next day. The next one too. One evening, he brought over some Asti Spumante, and we drank it warm out of the bottle, sitting up in bed. I didn’t get tight, or even high, yet somehow felt intoxicated. I was doing research for a prison novel, Baby Boy, and never let anything interfere with my schedule; just the same, we went to a movie the next afternoon, and the following Saturday, spent five hours together at an art museum. I discovered he knew the names of all birds, all trees, and all the supporting players in old films—Olga Baclanova, Guy Kibbee, Wynne Gibson, performers I thought only I remembered. In the third week, he phoned at four in the morning, burning up with fever, and I rushed downtown to take care of him. I wondered if I were getting too involved. I loved being with Lo, as I called him, and was flattered by his continued interest in me, but I was wary. To admire youth was one thing, but to e
ntrust my happiness to it, quite another. Fortunately, I was scheduled to go to Portugal a week later, and felt sure that by the time I returned, my balance would be restored.

  The loneliness I had almost forgotten about that previous month with Lo met me at Lisbon. I tried to counteract it at the beach at Capricos, whose convoluted paths in the underbrush made it the most welcoming stretch of sand this side of Fire Island; but the flood-tide of adventure there only seemed to exacerbate the feeling of isolation. I became more than ever aware of how much of my life was spent with people I only met once.

  An unexpected mirror in the cabana startled me into seeing myself as a stranger might: interesting eyes, but a much lived-in face. I was still slim, and thanks to my constancy at the gym, my pecs and biceps were sharply defined; but to hold the interest of one so much younger, I would need a lot more than any mirror could reflect—things like patience, good humor, fidelity, and, probably, forgiveness. My record here was poor. None of my love affairs had lasted very long. My attention span was brief, and my temper, quick. Disappointment in my career had sharpened my tongue until a pal of mine, Joe, conjectured that it must make kissing a hazard.

  Suddenly, I was scribbling all these negatives down in a letter, warning Lo in advance, utterly frank about everything except that I had a police record. I mailed it off before I could become rational again, and retracted it a hundred times in my head before his reply finally followed me to Paris. Even as I unfolded the letter, I assumed the worst from its formality—he had signed it with his full name the way people do complaints about a neighbor’s dog. However, the message itself restored my hope. Come home, it said. And at the bottom of the page, beneath that serious signature, “I burned your letter, in case you ever become famous.”

  Not immediately, but soon after my return, he moved into my little apartment on University Place. Very quickly, it lost its identity as mine, and became a painting-packed, clothes-littered replica of his Holland Tunnel studio, even to the smell of turpentine and garlic bread. I had never learned to cook—for years, had gone out for meals three times a day—but Lo brought several pots and pans with him, converted the tiny bathroom into a kitchen, and managed to cook three-course dinners on a hot plate. Of course, we had to turn off most of the lights while the food heated up, so as not to overwhelm my one-fuse electrical circuit; but the regular meals finally began to hide my hollows.

  My friends all met Lo and liked him, but not even Joe, the most positive person I knew, expected this affair to last: being faithful to one person was still an experiment for me. We were still together by summer, however, and on week-ends, went out to the Hamptons and stayed with Marion Cole. Lo loved it there—the motionless golden light by day, the nearness of the stars at night, and always the sea. Winslow Homer had once painted these dunes and windmills, he told me. So had Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase. I got used to him suddenly forgetting everything else, and, squinting at the distances, making quick mental sketches. The only cloud on this horizon was the strain of being at Marion’s. Some of the other boys staying there seemed attracted to Lo too, keeping me apprehensive and over-vigilant. And Marion, herself, appeared to be different: carping, even resentful. We began looking around for another place.

  The alternatives were murderously expensive. “Even garage apartments seem to be priced by the ounce,” I complained to a gentlewoman I knew. She started to apologize, as if it were all her fault. “Although,” she added thoughtfully, “I have a—Well, you wouldn’t be interested, it’s so—” The flutter of her hands tried to say it. So did the embarrassment in her eyes. To prove what couldn’t be articulated, she walked us to the back of her estate, and let us see for ourselves. Hidden from the road by overgrown shrubs was a strange little structure in a state of serious disrepair. The roof sagged, the remaining paint had crackled into mosaic, and grass grew in the rain gutters. It had been the carriage house in more splendid times, but since then, and for reasons she never explained, the stable, gazebo, and chicken coop had been moved up and tacked on to it, making an oddly joined complex of rooms. It was, in short, so ideal for us, we could scarcely keep a look of disdain on our faces as we bargained for it. I suggested that in lieu of rent for the next three months, Lo and I repair this—this—I searched for words sufficiently depreciating—this pathetic ruin. Our hostess, a bullet-proof powder puff if there ever was one, adored the idea of us making it habitable again, but fixed a good round sum for the privilege. “And,” she added, with logic that was all her own, “for fifty dollars more, you can stay through the winter for nothing.”

  It is true that the little house was not winterized—there was no heat or insulation, and the inside walls were made of thin cardboard. However, there was electricity and running water, and the roof only leaked badly in one area. Buying a bucket, some house paint, and a small Franklin stove, we moved in before reason could take control.

  It was a new kind of life for us both. We were up in the mornings at six to get in some writing or painting before we had to resume the home repairs that, each day, outclassed our ingenuity. Afternoons were spent swimming in the surf, and evenings, dancing at the gay discos. By the end of the first month, we dropped the discos as not really conducive to keeping a new couple together. We were both eager to leave the Quicksilver Mine, as we called the underground life—fast-moving, mercurial, but finally lethal. To cement the feeling of family, we decided to get a dog, and learned of a male Sheltie whose present owners were about to divorce. As neither of them wanted the other to have him, their solution was to give him away to strangers. We phoned at once, and asked to be considered.

  I had owned a Sheltie before, a perky gold and white winner. However, gold, white and perky was not what was led up to our door that night. The poor animal clearly knew he was being given away—his eyes were despairing, his tail drooped, and worry had thinned his coat. Only Picasso could have admired his gray and black markings, or understood the thin white line that divided his face, separating the spots on one side from the stripes on the other. His name was Toby, and his papers argued that he was thoroughbred, but although Lo was willing to accept him, I held out for more lively, not to mention better looking, companionship. Deciding to return him to his owners in the morning, I fixed him a bed in the corner. His mournful eyes followed me wherever I went, reminding me of times I had not pleased either. As I bent down to commiserate with him, he suddenly reached up and licked me across the face. There was no question after that—we had a dog!

  Other matters were not so immediately resolved. The corporation that Lo worked for moved to Washington, and offered to relocate him there at a better salary. Although he made his choice to stay on with me and Toby, the new work he found was unrewarding. What he really longed to do now was try his luck as a full-time artist, but since his savings were modest, and he would take no help from me, that would have to wait on developments. These came, but at their own speed, and by ways so labyrinthine as to be almost invisible. In my third year with him, the real estate office that had become our landlord in the city began making loud noises about the amount of time we were spending out on Long Island. There were new housing restrictions, my lawyer told me “—and in the end they’ll force you out of the apartment on University Place,” he added. “Still, that could take a couple of years, so it might be worth the company’s time to make you a generous offer to clear out sooner.”

  Clear out we did, the following summer. The cash settlement helped us find a gallery-like store front in the Hamptons, and, serving suitable wine and cheese, we exhibited a whole spectrum of paintings Lo had done of Long Island’s south fork. One of the critics called them “overtly picturesque,” utter damnation in that time of abstract expressionism; but he sold six landscapes, enough to launch his career as a painter. However, leaving University Place left us no place to live now but my father’s home in Florida, and the carriage house on the Island, a building no sturdier than a stage set, and with winter always waiting in the wings.

 
No, it was not entirely comfortable there, yet we came back to it year after year, arriving just after the first crocus, and leaving again only when the water began to freeze in the vases. Our benign rent inevitably escalated, but so, amazingly, did our combined incomes. We joined a local church, supported the library fund, and got to know our neighbors. The ivy we planted took over the fence, and a maple sapling by the front door gradually became a tree. Lo and I began to sound like each other, the way old couples do; and like them, we slammed doors and shouted at each other once or twice a year. Both of us still remember when, for the third time, he served ratatouille, a dish he knew I hated, and I threw it out into the garden. He knocked me down. I broke a flower pot over his head. Somehow, our future survived it.

  More and more, that was on our minds—surviving. It did not always seem possible. We had been shocked when one of our friends died after what seemed little more than a fever. He was only in his thirties, and people didn’t die that young. Then another died. And another. Nobody spoke of anything else, and suddenly we realized we were in the center of a plague. Its very name seemed to mock us: it was no aid to our newfound freedom. No cure for it was known, and the only precaution Lo and I could think of was to withdraw still further into our tight little world, population two.

  It seemed the perfect solution to everything, except that my work stopped. Back some years—about the time we got our cardboard house really fit to live in—I had sold a novel to Hollywood, and put a payment down on a place of our own. However, this added security did not prepare me for the months that followed when I sat down to write every morning, and not a word occurred to me. I had been happier these past years than ever before in my life, yet somehow the words, the images, the meaning, had stopped.