Body Language

by Michael Craft

  With a smirk, Cantrell dismissed the antics of his colleague and whisked past him to introduce himself to us, insisting that all of us simply call him Carrol. He was especially deferential to Grace Lord, his hostess, and studiously polite to Glee and me, “the press.” Engaged in conversation with us (his vivacious patter was likable enough, if phony), he ignored Bruno, who unloaded Carrol’s luggage from both the backseat and the trunk of the car, muttering at the task.

  An odder couple could not have blown into Dumont that morning. Carrol was almost freakishly tall and lanky, affectedly glib, obviously gay, stylishly dressed for travel in a sleek Armani suit, its jacket worn over a T-shirt—very California. By contrast, Bruno was a burly man, an unlikely figure in the tiny, fragile world of miniature furniture—the proverbial bull in a china shop. His clothes were wrinkled, and the sleeves of his corduroy jacket rode halfway up his forearms as he grunted and struggled with Carrol’s luggage, heaping it into a mound next to the car. Bruno’s sole affectation (or was it just that he was French?) was the richly patterned silk scarf knotted around his neck, its ends fluttering from the open collar of his shirt. He was sweating now, but Carrol looked cool and utterly unruffled by their argument in the car.

  “I can’t begin to tell you,” Grace was telling Carrol, still primping, “how honored we are that you’ve consented to judge the room-box competition. The Midwest Miniatures Society is abuzz!”

  “The honor is mine, of course,” he assured her, patting her head. His stature was gigantic compared to her tiny frame.

  “It’s not just the fact that you own the Hall of Miniatures,” Grace bubbled onward, “but the fact that you represent all of the world’s major artisans—including, of course, the esteemed Mr. Hérisson.”

  Bruno mumbled something in French. The words were unintelligible, but his tone carried unmistakable sarcasm.

  Glee entered the conversation, telling Carrol, “Grace has been working on a roombox of her own.”

  Grace quickly added a good-natured rebuff: “But it’s not finished—you’ll all see it in due time.”

  I told Carrol, “Don’t feel slighted—she wouldn’t show us either.” It was the first time I’d addressed him since being introduced.

  He spun to look at me. “Oh, really?” He smiled while eyeing me—those teeth really were too white—bleached, capped, who knows? His gaze gave me a quick once-over, sizing me up. I wore my usual workday “uniform”—khaki slacks, navy blazer, button-down shirt, striped tie—nothing fashion-forward, by any stretch. Perhaps he found me refreshingly wholesome, because his inquisitive look mutated into an eat-me leer. “What would it take to persuade her?” he asked me, his voice subdued to a purr.

  “I think she just needs a little more time.” Our small talk had grown meaningless, as my mind was absorbed by his come-on. Not that I was interested. I was happily attached to Neil, and more to the point, I wasn’t at all attracted to Carrol. Still, it felt good to be cruised by another gay man—a rare commodity in Dumont.

  “Mark, has anyone ever told you, you have the most arrestingly green eyes?”

  Bruno interrupted this exchange. “If you gentlemen have finished with your chitchat”—he pronounced it more like shit-shot—“perhaps we could all assist his majesty in conveying his matériel up to the royal quarters.” He flipped the tail of his gold-toned cravat over one shoulder. “Then I must leave.”

  Glee and I stole a glimpse of each other and, though tempted, suppressed the urge to snicker. What, I wondered, was the background of this sparring between Bruno and Carrol—professional rivalry, or something more personal?

  We all exchanged a shrug of resignation, then set about the task of hauling Carrol’s things toward the coach-house stairs. By my calculation, the king of miniatures would be staying in Dumont no more than ten days, but from the look of his luggage, you’d have thought he was staying for good. Indeed, I was amazed that Bruno had managed to get all of it into his car. There was a matched set of suitcases, Vuitton, of course. Added to this were an array of garment bags, duffels, leather briefcase, computer case—even a hatbox.

  As Carrol leaned to lift a couple of his bags from the ground, the sleeves of his jacket rode up his arms, and I noticed that he wore jewelry on both hands—too much, in my opinion, even for a gay man. There were several rings, bracelets, and a diamond-studded watch, all of it the highly refined craft of top designers, with a single exception. Conspicuously, one of his baubles was not polished gold, but scuffed nickel—a utilitarian chain around his wrist held a medallion with a worn enamel symbol on it. Though I couldn’t read it from where I stood, it appeared to be a Medic Alert bracelet.

  Also inconsistent with Carrol’s fastidious attire was a fat pen of inelegant design that was clipped to his inside breast pocket. I have always had an affection for fountain pens—my own pet pen, an antique Montblanc, is a civilized luxury in an age of throwaway ballpoints and felt-tips. So while I admired the man for taking a stand against the pervasive Bic culture, I was dismayed by his particular choice of writing instrument, which was, in a word, butt ugly (okay, two words).

  “Hey!” a voice interrupted us as we began our ungainly procession up the stairs to the coach house. “Let me help!” Trotting up the driveway alongside the house was Douglas Pierce, sheriff of Dumont County. Stopping at the foot of the stairs, he explained, “I saw your car, Mark, and wondered what was up.”

  Carrol now took note of the Bavarian V-8 and told me as an aside, winking, “Tasty wheels, Mark.”

  Pierce’s arrival necessitated introductions to both Carrol and Bruno, so we all took a moment to set down our loads while performing these courtesies. It wasn’t easy conveying to Bruno the nature of Pierce’s job, none of us knowing if there was a French counterpart to an American sheriff. Avoiding allusions to Hollywood or the Wild West, I explained, “The city of Dumont is part of Dumont County, and the county maintains our police force. Doug is chief of the county police.”

  Bruno nodded, but still seemed muddled. Tentatively, he asked Pierce, “This is how you…dress?”

  Pierce laughed. “I’m an elected administrator. I don’t wear a uniform.”

  Bruno’s confusion was understandable. I’d first met Doug Pierce during the week I moved to Dumont. Arriving from the big bad city, I harbored the jaded view that the local constabulary would be straight out of Mayberry, but Pierce didn’t fit that stereotype at all. To begin with, he did not wear a uniform—no badge, no six-shooter, no cop trappings. In fact, he was a natty dresser, far nattier than I, and I never saw him wear the same thing two days running. There was some trouble back then, and Pierce proved himself a dedicated professional, a new friend, and an important news source in my work at the Register. I’m truly glad to know him.

  But I wish I knew him better. Though I see him nearly every day—he often stops by the paper to visit, and he frequently joins us at the house for breakfast after his morning workout—there’s a sector of his private life that’s strictly off-limits. At forty-five, he has never married, claiming to be wed to his career. Perhaps it’s just my mind-set, but naturally I suspect he’s gay, and he has never said anything to dissuade me from this notion. Someday, I keep telling myself, when the time is right, I’ll simply ask him about this, point-blank.

  “My,” cooed Carrol Cantrell, “you’re certainly an accommodating public servant, Sheriff.” He was giving Pierce the same onceover he had given me only minutes before.

  Pierce obligingly swept up several of Carrol’s bags, including the hatbox. “I need to foster all the goodwill I can—I’m up for reelection this November.” Pierce laughed again, and I suddenly got the impression that he was actually enjoying Carrol’s come-on.

  As we all began plodding up the stairs together, Carrol paused to finger the lapel of Pierce’s sport coat. “Beautiful jacket, Sheriff. Ralph Lauren?”

  Puh-leez.

  Pierce answered, “Nah. Brooks Brothers.” He may have blushed.

  Watching this exchange,
I realized that in the year I’d known him, I’d come to take Pierce’s good looks for granted. For a middle-aged man, he was perfectly fit and ruggedly handsome, an image that was complemented by his knack for dressing well. Carrol was right: Pierce was wearing a beautiful jacket, rusty tweed, exactly right for the in-between weather of that autumn morning. His gray flannel slacks, double-pleated with razor-sharp creases, found a dead match in the darker tones of the tweed jacket. He deserved Carrol’s compliments.

  Continuing up the stairs, Carrol chattered vacuously about something as we, his retinue, prepared to ensconce him in Grace Lord’s coach house.

  To the fanfare of his own ringing laughter, the king, indeed, had arrived.

  Friday, September 15

  DOMESTICITY HAD NEVER PLAYED much of a role in my life. During my younger years, as a bachelor reporter, building a career at the Chicago Journal, I had little time for nest-feathering and not much interest in it either. But two events—turning points, really—would effect a profound change in my indifference to house and home.

  First, I met Neil. I had never been truly in love before, and then, at thirty-nine, I found it—with a man (egads) who happened to be an architect. This resolved a particular identity crisis that had long gnawed at me (I could no longer brush aside the suspicion that I might be gay), and just as certainly, it imbued in me a new appreciation for the great indoors. I had bought a condominium loft in Chicago’s trendy Near North neighborhood, but it was Neil who moved from Phoenix to live with me, setting his talents to designing and rebuilding the space. When we’d finished the project, we had carved out a magazine-perfect showplace; we’d also built a “home.”

  Then, less than a year ago, within a week of my move north to Dumont, Thad Quatrain’s life merged with mine. It was an inauspicious melding, to say the least. My nephew (technically, a second cousin) was an absolute snot toward Neil and me, with all the charm and lovability of a juvenile homophobic bigot, which in fact he was on the day when he met us. Imagine his dismay when, that very afternoon, his mother died young and I was named in her will to look after him. Imagine his dismay? Imagine mine.

  Having grown comfortable in the role of a “gay urban professional,” I had never given a moment’s thought to the possibility of rearing a child, but there I was, suddenly faced with that unlikely task. Adapting to the day-to-day weirdness of life with a teenager would be challenging enough; far more daunting was the forced change of mind-set, the identity crisis. How was I to think of my self? Did my vocabulary even possess the words that might name this new me? Gay dad, Uncle Mark, Neil’s lover, Thad’s father…

  But we managed to pull together—Thad and I, and Neil too. While Neil taught me how to become half of a couple, Thad has taught me to be part of a family. Domesticity now plays a large role in my life. As a result, the focus of my days has changed.

  There was a time, not so long ago, when the evening cocktail hour embodied my notion of the day’s ultimate reward—a brief, civilized period of repose, refreshment, and conversation, replete with its own comforting rituals—the polishing of crystal to perfect cleanliness, the clink of ice, the skoal, the first shared sip. Neil and I declared an ingenuous concoction to be “our” drink on the night we met, and every evening since (every evening, that is, when we have been together), we have poured Japanese vodka over ice, garnishing it with orange peel while leaving the day’s travails behind.

  Now this routine has been interrupted and refocused. The interruption was my own doing, the result of moving north to Wisconsin to try my hand as a publisher. Neil’s architectural practice would keep him anchored to Chicago, so he agreed to a plan of alternating weekend visits with me, taking turns at the four-hour drive. Our “arrangement” had barely begun when that unexpected death in the Quatrain family left me executor of a huge estate that includes Quatro Press, Dumont’s largest industry. Because I now serve on Quatro’s board of directors, I had no trouble securing for Neil a contract to design a major expansion of the printing plant. The project has kept him in Dumont full-time for several months, and we feel like a couple again, sharing the same bed nightly. Once again, our evenings are a time when we can regularly, predictably share the simple adult pleasure of cocktails at home.

  But now “home” has a new meaning for us. There is a sixteen-year-old living under our roof, and that roof represents his home as well. Even though Neil and I still enjoy our drink before dinner, this is not a ritual that can include Thad. He is, of course, too young to booze with us, and even if we’d permit it, he could not fully grasp the pleasure, meaning, and responsibility of the cocktail hour. In time, he’ll learn these things. Not yet though.

  So the focus of my days has shifted from seven in the evening to seven in the morning. Breakfast—who’d have thought it?—has become the central event in our shared life as a family. We know there will be no other activities to rob us of each other’s company at that hour. We can use that time to stay in touch. We can talk.

  “We need peanut butter,” said Thad, clanging a knife within the nearly empty jar, scooping out the last of the beige goo, spreading it on a piece of hot toast. He wore one of those long, baggy sweaters that hang a foot below the waist.

  “It’s on the list,” Neil told him, looking up from the “Trends” section of that Friday’s edition of the Dumont Daily Register. “I’ll shop tomorrow morning.”

  “That bites.” Thad sat at the kitchen table between Neil and me—we faced each other from opposite sides, dressed for work, me in a tie, Neil in a soft but tight turtleneck that displayed a buffed upper torso he’d be foolish to hide. Across from Thad, a fourth place was set with a napkin and an empty mug, should Sheriff Pierce join us, as was his habit.

  It was a homey scene, in spite of its not-so-typical cast of characters. The setting too had an atypical edge. The house, built by my late uncle, my mother’s brother, had been designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin. It was vintage Prairie School, a style that, while distinctly American, is a rarity in its purest execution. The kitchen had been updated before I moved into the house, but it was a thoughtful renovation, sensitive to Wright’s style, leaving no doubt that we occupied a “significant” home. Walls of elongated horizontal brick intersected elegantly vertical cabinets of pale wood. A row of high windows punctured the outside wall, framing rectangles of a perfect September sky. The back door stood open to a cool morning breeze that huffed through the screen and whorled with the smell of hot coffee.

  Thad chomped his toast, gulped his milk. Peering at him over the front section of the paper, I asked, “What bites?”

  Thad cast a sympathetic glance toward Neil, telling me, “Shopping on Saturday.” Thad shuddered at the thought of the crowded supermarket, the wasted weekend morning. “Hazel always shopped during the week.”

  I reminded him, “Hazel’s somewhere in Florida.” We were speaking of Hazel Healy, the unlikely name of the Quatrain family’s longtime housekeeper, now retired. All of us were still busy adjusting to our new life together in the house on Prairie Street, so we’d put off the search for live-in help. The prospect of bringing a stranger into our home had little appeal for any of us, though we all recognized the logistical advantages that would be reaped from finding Hazel’s successor.

  “I don’t mind,” Neil told us, referring to the shopping. “Really.” He was gracious if not sincere—the thought of slogging through those crammed aisles with a clattering, banged-up wire cart was enough to knot my stomach.

  Changing the subject, I asked Thad, “Two weeks into it, how does it feel to be an upperclassman?” He had just started his junior year.

  “Okay, I guess. I like most of my classes, but chemistry’s a drag.”

  Neil winced, remembering something painful. “I never got the hang of chemistry either. I kept telling myself that it was something like cooking—that the chemical equations were just ‘recipes’—but one afternoon during lab, my experimental dash of ammonia in Clorox turned the brew in my beak
er sufficiently toxic to evacuate an entire wing of the school. The mixture had produced chloramine gas, a particularly noxious agent.” He laughed lamely.

  Thad’s laughter was hearty. “So then what happened?”

  “My counselor finally bought my argument that chemistry was of no use to an aspiring architect, and he let me transfer directly into physics. The lab sessions were considerably less hazardous, but it was still no fun.”

  Thad thought for a moment. “Neil? What did you do for fun?”

  Neil glanced at me. The night before, in bed, we’d aired our concern that while Thad seemed committed enough to his classes, he had no apparent outside interests. Sports did nothing for him, in spite of our gentle prodding to make a runner out of him, an activity that both Neil and I still enjoyed together; we’d have happily included him. The dating bug had not yet bitten, though it was surely only a matter of time. As for clubs or band or whatever, he just wasn’t involved. And though he never spoke of it, we assumed he was still in repressed mourning over the loss of his mother. Neil and I agreed that it was important for Thad to find something, or his boredom might lead to trouble.

  So Neil answered, “I ran cross-country. And I got into extracurricular art projects—set-decorating for school plays. I was even in a play or two.” He could also have mentioned chairing the decorating committee for his prom, but he must have decided Thad would judge his experience with tinsel and chicken wire a tad fruity.

  Thad’s face wrinkled in thought as he wiped peanut butter from the corner of his mouth. He asked me, “How ’bout you, Mark? What’d you do in school—I mean, besides ‘school.’”