Walking the Perfect Square

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  His studio/apartment was on Hester Street on the Lower East Side. Getting up to his rooms was an adventure in urine and broken syringes. Julio greeted me at the door with a joint in his hand. I politely turned down his offer to share. There was a pale skeleton of a girl passed out on his living room floor. With a pair of striped pajamas and a yellow star, she would have cast well in any concentration camp role.

  Julio put his hand out for the film. I delivered it to him wrapped in two twenties and a ten.

  “That’s two sets,” I reminded him, “and a proof sheet.”

  For another ten bucks, he let me have unlimited use of his phone. I wonder if Julio would have upped the ante if he knew I was going to call Florida? Tony the Pony Palone was just as surprised, but less grumpy, about my call than Pete Parson had earlier been. We talked old times, my retirement and discussed his bourgeoning construction business there in Fort Lauderdale. He offered me a job.

  “You can’t trust these Bible-bangin’ yahoos down here. They quote scripture to you and rob you blind. I need to import a New York Jew. There’s plenty of ’em here already, but they’re all like a hundred and fifty years old. You know what I mean? Forget about it.”

  I told him I’d think about it—which I did for a second—and mentioned that his cousin Nicky and I were becoming friendly. He knew that, he said, Nicky had called him about me. Unfortunately, I said, I only had Nicky’s number at work. This was no good because I got a sudden request for passes to his place tonight and couldn’t reach him. Tony came through with Nicky’s home number. Tony took my number down and promised to call. I hung up thinking I’d probably never hear from him or him from me again.

  I didn’t wake Nicky up because Nicky hadn’t yet been to sleep. He was happy to hear from me, but turned sour when he found out it was really Bear I was looking for. He loosened back up when I told him I’d just spoken to his big cousin Tony. We talked about the party at Pooty’s for a bit and he begged me to come in again soon. Like Tony, Nicky didn’t trust the people he had chosen to surround himself with. He too wanted an old neighborhood type around.

  “You can work security. I’ll pay you cash.”

  Frankly, it was a more tempting offer than Tony’s and when I told him I’d consider it, I meant it. But in the meantime I needed Bear’s address and/or phone number. He gave me both. I promised to see him soon and to kiss Katy for him. The whole time I was on the phone, skeleton girl hadn’t moved. I was about to check her pulse when Julio reappeared.

  Handing me the pictures, he seemed surprised, almost wary. Apparently he was taken aback by their rather innocuous subject matter. I suppose he was more accustomed to bare breasts and rubber lingerie. Private porn and divorce work was more than likely his bread and butter. When I surveyed the photos, I understood his desperate conditions. He did shitty work, but the pictures I needed were clear enough and he gave me back the negatives. I thanked him out of habit.

  “Anytime,” he said hopefully.

  Somehow I didn’t think so.

  I decided against calling Bear. The motorcycle club where he crashed wasn’t too far from my final destination. I dropped the negatives off at a real photo lab on the way.

  “I’m coming,” he shouted through the door, his heavy footfalls registering as he approached.

  “Hey Bear,” I greeted him warmly.

  Panic looked almost comical on his big brooding face. “What do you want? What are you doing—”

  I shoved two pictures at him: “Is this the man you saw with Patrick at SBNF and stag at Dirt Lounge?”

  “That’s him. Look, you gotta get outta—”

  “Can you remember whether he paid his way in,” I continued, “or if he used a guest—”

  “Guest pass,” Bear answered distractedly. “He definitely used a pass. Is that all?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  He slammed the door shut before I could thank him.

  It had taken less than ten minutes for me to walk from Bear’s clubhouse door to where I now stood. I didn’t have to ring a second time.

  “I’ve been waiting for you all night,” Jack said, pulling back the door. “I suppose you had better come on in.”

  He directed me toward a small kitchen table and poured me a cup of coffee.

  I demanded to know: “Is Patrick here?”

  Jack nodded at a closed bedroom door. “In there.”

  “Come on, open up and let me speak to him. Let’s get this over with.”

  “He asked me to speak to you for him. What will it cost you to hear me out?”

  “How do I know you’re not stalling for him? He could be headed down the fire escape or already be halfway to God-knows-where by now. How do I know he’s even in there?”

  “Because I give you my word.” He extended his right hand. “Do I have yours?”

  I shook his hand that he did indeed have my word. He sat down across from me and poured coffee for himself. He lit a Marlboro.

  “Oh, how rude,” he said. “Do you mind?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What was it? How’d you know?” he wondered. “It was that I asked how Katy was holding up, wasn’t it? God, I knew it the second I asked.”

  “No, not necessarily. I was pretty drunk when you asked after Katy. I’ll admit to being confused by your question because Katy and I had been real careful to not mention her last name or connection to Patrick. But it had been a long night. Everybody was tired and drunk. I couldn’t be sure one of us hadn’t let something slip. I figured maybe one of the regulars knew Katy.”

  “What was it then?”

  “A lot of things,” I said. “The shirt, for one.”

  Jack was confused. “The shirt? I don’t under—”

  “When Patrick was spotted in Hoboken, there was a second witness.”

  “But the papers didn’t say anything about a second witness.”

  “It never made the papers,” I explained. “They dismissed it as unreliable info. I guess no one figured he’d be out buying dress shirts.”

  Jack smiled sadly. “It is a beautiful shirt.”

  It was more than the shirt. Without referring to Bear by name or description, I detailed how I had hit upon a source who’d spotted Patrick with a companion at SBNF. The source had also spotted Patrick’s companion at Dirt Lounge. I reminded Jack that he was the one who’d brought up his visit to Dirt Lounge.

  “It was right after I asked about Katy,” he remembered. “I was trying to change subjects so you wouldn’t dwell on my faux pas. I didn’t know I was just digging myself in deeper.”

  I tried letting him off the hook: “Like with the shirt, you couldn’t have known. It wasn’t one thing, Jack. It was a lot of little coincidences that added up in my sleep. And even though I woke up knowing, all the ifs broke my way and against you.”

  If Pete hadn’t taken pictures last night . . . If Pete had gone home instead of sleeping it off at Pooty’s . . . If I’d failed to get a rush job on the developing . . . If my source wasn’t home or was out of town and couldn’t identify Jack as the man he saw with Patrick and again at Dirt Lounge . . .

  Had any of the ifs gone against me, I offered, it could have been days or even weeks before I could confirm Jack’s connection to Patrick.

  He laughed, “I suppose that should make me feel better.”

  “That’s up to you, I guess.”

  “I guess.”

  I downed my coffee in one swallow. “So now you know how I got here, but . . .”

  “You want to know about Patrick and me.”

  “You could say I’m a little curious, yeah.”

  He tamped his cigarette out in a crowded ashtray, lit himself a new one and braced himself with coffee. But caffeine and nicotine weren’t doing the trick. Jack’s yellowed fingers still shook terribly. “I don’t know where to start.”

  I suggested he begin with Tina Martell.

  Jack looked surprised and impressed all at once. None of the other investigators had eve
n mentioned her name. But when he hesitated, what Jack saw on my face was impatience. “A lot of us have our first sexual experiences with women,” he said, confirming Dr. Friar’s information. “For me the experience was so antithetical to my being that it allowed me to finally confront my gayness and accept it eventually. But we all grow up in different worlds, Mr.—What should I call you?”

  “Moe is good.”

  “While in our bones, Moe, people like Patrick and me and the man who saw us together at SBNF might have a very similar sense of ourselves sexually: we are unique, as distinctive from each other as, let’s say, you and me.”

  “Individual dynamics. Yeah, Jack, I’ve already heard this lecture,” the impatience crept from my face into my voice. “I want details, not paperback psychology, okay? Because, if you don’t give them to me, so help me God, I’ll march into that room and drive him up to Dutchess County at gunpoint.”

  “Patrick,” Jack continued, “has been struggling since he was a kid to deny his sexuality. I did the same thing. But high school makes it almost impossible. Dances, class trips, proms, everything about high school forces you to deal with who you are, especially the stuff you hate about yourself. In his senior year, Patrick found himself profoundly attracted to another man, his art instructor. That was difficult enough to handle, but when the teacher made advances toward Patrick, Patrick freaked out.”

  “So what’s this got to do with Tina Martell?”

  “Patrick wasn’t stupid,” Jack explained. “He knew he was good-looking and he knew about Tina’s appetite for co—for boys. For Patrick, she was the path of least resistance.”

  “She was easy.”

  But unlike Jack’s dreadful encounter with the opposite sex, Patrick’s didn’t force him to deal honestly with his sexuality. Instead of seeing Tina as a tramp, Patrick saw her as vulnerable, someone he could manipulate. Naively, Patrick believed he could trade on his looks and respectability to exorcize his demons. Tina Martell would become his girlfriend and marry him eventually. Though he was a little vague on the mechanics of it, Patrick convinced himself he would transform her while she was transforming him. And when she got pregnant, he thought his plan was working out better than expected.

  “Silly notion, but it just shows you how desperately inexperienced he was,” Jack said, staring mournfully at the bedroom door. “I guess you know that Tina wasn’t interested in playing house and had—”

  “—an abortion. Yeah, I know.”

  “You see, unlike Patrick, she knew what she wanted and what she wanted didn’t include Patrick and a baby and a mortgage. She probably didn’t even like him very much.”

  “I don’t think she likes anybody very much,” I said, “including herself.”

  Jack agreed about Tina. Most gay men, he thought, having gone through that experience with Tina, might have just chucked the whole transformation fantasy and gotten on with their real lives.

  “You know, it’s like the denial our parents go through. When I told my father I was gay, he was eerily calm about it: ‘You just haven’t met the right girl,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Come on, we’ll go into Cincinnati and catch a Reds game.’ My mom was the same way.”

  His attempt at transformation having failed, yet still unwilling to accept himself, Patrick was in a bad place. That’s when, according to Jack, the obsessive-compulsive behaviors started. The disease progressed just the way Dr. Friar had described it to me. When I asked Jack about walking the perfect square, he was again surprised and impressed.

  “Patrick says his symptoms abated somewhat his freshman year at college. He immersed himself in schoolwork and student government. He tried to be social, woefully unprepared as he was. But even the best camouflage breaks down under prolonged scrutiny. He couldn’t suppress his attraction to other men forever. The strain of his attractions started getting to him and by his sophomore year, the symptoms were worse. He began to withdraw. I guess he panicked.”

  “That’s panic, spelled N-a-n-c-y-L-u-s-t-i-g.”

  Jack shook his head in resignation. “It was Tina Martell all over again. But there were cracks in his fantasy this time, even early on. He started seeing a therapist at school, a Dr. Blum.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I confessed.

  “You mean there’s something you didn’t know?” Jack feigned shock. “Anyway, it was while Patrick was seeing Nancy that we met. Katy brought him in a few times. Of course, I didn’t know who Katy was then. I can’t say what it was exactly, but I was drawn to him. He’s god-awful handsome, but that wasn’t it. Maybe I’m just a sucker for wounded men. I don’t know.”

  “He talked about his . . . um, his—”

  “God, no,” Jack laughed. “But one knows. Blacks can spot a light-skinned brother or sister trying to pass as white. I spotted him. That’s all.”

  Jack said he cultivated a grudging friendship with Patrick, being careful never to discuss his own gayness. Soon, Patrick began to frequent Pooty’s without Katy. And when he did, Jack would play the patient bartender, listening to Patrick’s complaints about his unfriendly roommates and his relationship with Nancy. Then at the end of March or in early April, something changed.

  “He started coming in a lot, a few times a week,” Jack said. “I didn’t think it was the beer or the jukebox. It’s quite a haul from Hofstra to the city and back again. He cut his hair short and flirted with me a bit.”

  Just as Bear’s revelation about SBNF had hit me, I was floored again: “Holy shit! Caligula’s! There was a couple that—Nancy ran. He stayed. You mean he . . . he let—”

  Jack confirmed what I hadn’t finished saying. “For Patrick it was the perfect setting to finally take the—to experiment. Being there with Nancy was like work for Patrick, a chore. When she ran home, it was like being given a day off. He was free of her. Have you ever been to a sex club?”

  “Like Caligula’s? No.”

  “I don’t prefer them myself,” Jack was quick to say, “but the atmosphere inside them can be quite intoxicating.”

  “That’s weird,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “Nancy Lustig said something like that to me. She said it was amazing inside Caligula’s; raw and sweet and dangerous.”

  “So after years of trying to hold himself back, Patrick finally let go. I think the fact that there was an approving female presence made it easier for Patrick. And the anonymity of it helped. No one knew who he was. No one cared about how much political clout his old man had or felt sorry about Francis Jr. getting shot down. With no audience to play to, he . . . well . . .”

  “I think I can understand.”

  “One night with an anonymous man at a club didn’t transform him any more than humping Tina in the back seat or forcing himself on Nancy in her dorm room had. It was the beginning of an arduous journey. Patrick being Patrick, though, he retreated into his old fantasy. Now, as symbols go, Nancy took on mythic importance. The part of Patrick that stubbornly refused to acknowledge his gayness invested everything it had into poor Nancy. And if she hadn’t become pregnant,” Jack supposed, “the entire charade would have collapsed under its own weight.”

  I pointed to the bedroom. “Did your boyfriend tell you what he did when she turned down his marriage proposal? How he dislocated her—”

  “Can’t you understand what he was going through?” Jack pleaded defensively. “Years of denial and self-recrimination and false hopes came crashing down all at once. You can’t believe he meant to hurt her.”

  “I don’t know Patrick,” I said. “I know of him. Even now with him ten feet away from me on the other side of a door, he exists to me only in other people’s words. He’s a handsome face on ten thousand posters. That’s it. He’s as much a myth to me as Nancy was to him. If he wants forgiveness, tell him to go to confession.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack apologized. “I love him. He’s very real to me.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “After she had the abortion,” Jack went on, �
��Patrick turned to me for help. But it wasn’t magic. He wasn’t ready to come out to his family and his symptoms had almost taken on a life of their own. Even as he became more comfortable with himself, he couldn’t seem to get past the tics.”

  Just then I noticed a small, framed illustration of what looked to be a Chinese character with a red rose running through it. The long stem of the rose was skillfully woven through the black strokes which conspired to create the character. I recognized the PMM in one corner.

  “Do you like it?” Jack, happy to break the tension, was eager to know.

  “Very much. I think I recognize it, but I’m not sure where from.”

  He rolled up the right sleeve on his now very wrinkled white shirt to reveal a replica of the illustration tattooed on his forearm. Patrick, he said, had one just like it. He didn’t know what the character translated into in English, but they liked to think it meant forever.

  “The rose was Patrick’s doing. It’s woven in there like that to show that love is part of the fabric of eternity. That’s what I like to think it means. Patrick says it’s just a rose.”

  “You were telling me about his symptoms.”

  According to Jack, Patrick had stopped seeing Dr. Blum months before his crisis with Nancy. Even during the time he saw the shrink, Patrick made little progress. And, as far as the obsessive-compulsive problems, talking therapy alone didn’t really seem to be of much use. Jack did some research and found a psychologist at Mount Sinai who had had some success treating obsessive-compulsive neurosis using an integrated program of behavior modification, drugs and traditional therapy.

  Patrick took a few summer school classes at the New School to justify his being in the city. He scheduled his therapy sessions around his classes.

  “Sounds expensive,” I commented.

  “I had some savings and the tips at Pooty’s are good.”

  “Is the treatment helping?”

  Jack lit another Marlboro. “Not miraculously. It’s like peeling the skin off an onion one thin layer at a time. Don’t misunderstand, there’s been a lot of improvement and some of the intensity of the behaviors has quieted down. But it’s not as if Patrick’s conquered it. It’s more like he’s made a working agreement with the disease.”