Between Men

by Richard Canning

  “That’s not what I want,” he said. “I’ve finished my biography of Mary of Teck and I have nothing to read. I need gossip!”

  But there was none. The guests consisted of a couple from Cincinnati who had gone to St. Bart’s the previous winter; an Italian businessman looking for a lot on which to build a vacation home; a fabric designer from the West Village whose wife taught fencing to senior citizens in New Jersey; a composer from Brooklyn; and the copulating couple from Detroit. A plump, bearded man in his fifties completed the roster—a stage manager from Manhattan who spent most of the day lying by the pool on a chaise longue, wrapped in a leopard-skin-patterned cloth, coughing. That was it. A young woman named Peggy waited on tables while the owner—the shoe manufacturer who’d sold his factory to buy the hotel—sat at a table in the atrium with a morose expression doing paperwork.

  The conversation at breakfast illustrated perfectly that peculiar phenomenon of travelers who talk about the places they have just been or are about to visit—everything but where they are. The woman from Brooklyn told us about a bicycle trip through Zambia she had just finished; the couple from Cincinnati talked about Barcelona; the fabric designer about Bali; the couple from Detroit Belize. This had one advantage: no intimacies were established—the common topic (travel) let everyone express himself while remaining completely unknown. This, however, was only a goad to Kent, who said, as we were leaving the hotel after breakfast, “I think we should get drunk tonight and stir things up—be rude to everyone. Let’s tell Irving his hotel is a dump, let’s tell Peggy the chicken Kiev tastes like lighter fluid, let’s tell the couple from Michigan they woke you up with their morning screw, and let’s ask the stage manager where he got that hideous caftan and the ridiculous jewelry. Let’s get stinko! Let’s get something started! It’s all too dull!”

  “Divinely dull,” sighed Dennis as we headed toward a grove of sea grape trees sheltering the beach. “Divinely, deliciously, delectably dull. Just the way I wanted it!” he said, taking Kent’s arm.

  They were still in that stage in which the simplest act—preparing to dress for the beach in their rooms, or spreading their towels out once we got to the lagoon—was freighted with affection. Moments after running into the ocean with hands held, they were wrapped so tightly in each other’s arms, their two heads looked from a distance like one coconut bobbing on the waves. After our swim, Dennis lay his head on Kent’s stomach while Kent read aloud a story about Dolly Parton in the Enquirer and Dennis stared into space, silenced by one of those moments when at last life is perfect.

  “You know,” said Dennis, when Kent went back in the water, “I’m afraid my darling drinks a teensy bit too much, and I suspect his mother will never let him bring me back to the stately home—there really is one, dear, it’s called Cranston Hall—but you must admit he’s awfully handsome. Don’t you think?” He looked over at me, squinting in the sunlight: “I hope, by the way, you got a shot of us when we were coming out of the sea just now. You mustn’t forget the photographs. This is my honeymoon, and you know how much the scrapbooks mean to me! It’s all going in my scrapbooks. I want every magic moment registered! If you get my drift, dear.”

  “I do,” I said. Indeed, I knew about those scrapbooks. They occupied three shelves in Dennis’s apartment on Tenth Street and seemed, at times, to be his reason for living—not whatever he experienced, but the photograph of it, mounted. I couldn’t decide if this was because Dennis knew more than most that life is fleeting, so he’d better record what he could, or because all that mattered to him was the visual representation of something, not the thing itself. At any rate, I was here to record his bliss in permanent chemicals, and moments later, when Kent ran out of the water and Dennis rose to greet him, I was already standing with camera in hand by the time they embraced as Dennis yelled to me, “Be sure there’s no seaweed in the shot! I want no seaweed! And wait for the sand in the water to settle! I want it clear! Like a glass of gin!”

  Click. Later that afternoon while they snored, I got up to explore a path that led through the sea grape grove to a brackish swamp in whose shallow water pink crabs scuttled to hide at my approach, a path that brought me to the edge of a coral cliff, with a view of another, blazing beach I could not reach, then back through a grove of thorn trees, where I came upon a discarded turquoise bathing suit, more erotic than any person could have been. At dusk we walked home on the path that linked three beaches, the sky above us changing color, as I allowed my friends to walk ahead, arm in arm. In the gloom horses stood watching as we passed. A man was seated on the hood of his car at the main beach, staring out to sea, as if he wanted to be somewhere else.

  We were quite happy to be where we were, however; everything was perfect, so that at first it seemed of little interest that evening that there were two new guests seated at the table in the corner of the terrace. Both looked like college students. One was remarkably handsome; the other had black, curly hair, braces on his teeth, and a T-shirt that said VILLANOVA. At first they made no impression. Then Kent leaned over the little candle floating between us and said, “Well? What do you think?”

  “What, dear?” said Dennis.

  “Are they?” said Kent.

  “Are they what?” said Dennis.

  “You know, that way.”

  “Why, I don’t know,” said Dennis, as he munched on a bread stick. “It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder. But I am prepared to receive vibrations.” Then he fell silent while we consumed our soup, as still as a radar screen waiting for a blip to appear; Dennis was trying to receive vibrations, I realized; he prided himself on his ability to receive vibrations. “I think they’re straight,” he finally said. “Two friends, students, who decided to travel together.”

  At this point the handsome one was looking around at the other guests; the other did not look up at all.

  “I remember traveling at that age with a friend,” said Kent. “He was very shy. Terrified, in fact, that I might run off and leave him. It came to a head in a museum in Munich. I turned away from a painting of, what else, Saint Sebastian, and literally cut my cheek on the edge of his glasses—he had been standing an inch away from me, following me from painting to painting, like a child holding on to his mother’s skirt. I told him I wasn’t moving till he went off to look at paintings on his own. Travel frightens some people.” He sipped his consommé and said, “That’s what I think about them. One’s shy, the other isn’t.”

  “Clinging to his friend?” said Dennis.

  “Exactly,” said Kent.

  “But this is not the sort of place college students come on vacation,” said Dennis. “It’s too out of the way. Maybe they are family. On the other hand, no homosexual wears braces on his teeth! Would a homosexual wear braces on his teeth?” he said to Peggy as she arrived with the paella.

  “You got me,” she said.

  “We’re wondering who the new guests are,” said Dennis.

  “They’re from New Jersey,” she said. “Will you be having wine?”

  Kent said, “Yes.” Dennis said, “No.”

  “Oh, go ahead,” said the stage manager from New York, rising from his table next to ours. “Life’s a banquet and most poor fools are starving to death!” For a moment we thought he was going to join us, but instead he headed for the two young men, and began to sing, in a quavering contralto, a song from The King and I. “Hello, young lovers, whoever you are,” he sang as he walked right past them, “I hope you’re faithful and true. ...”

  Dennis turned to us with his mouth agape. “That’s exactly what I don’t want to be like when I get old,” he said.

  At that moment the two newcomers rose from their table.

  “Good evening,” Kent said as they came near.

  The handsome one stopped, while the boy with braces kept right on walking. We talked about beaches, we told him how to get to our favorite, he thanked us and said good night. The palms rustled. The pool hiccuped. The horse flicked its tail. Kent put his fork do
wn and said: “I’m sure he’s not.”

  “I think he’s dead gay!” said Dennis.

  “You’re wrong,” said Kent. “He’s too relaxed!”

  “Can’t homosexuals be relaxed?”

  “No,” said Kent. “Not really. They live in a state of perpetual anxiety—for two very good reasons. One, they never know when they may be beaten up. Two, they worry that queens like us will come on to them. They live in a constant fear of predation. But the boy just now illustrated none of that. There was no fear—of punishment or sex. He was relaxed. A homosexual is never relaxed—because it’s not easy being a ponce.”

  “It’s dead easy,” said Dennis.

  “That may be true in your case, actually,” Kent said, looking at Dennis as if regarding him from a new, anthropological light. “I think you probably are one of the few people I have ever met who really don’t seem, on some level, bothered by it.”

  “What’s to be bothered by?” said Dennis. “The queen got one thing right—life is a banquet, and most poor fools are starving to death! Those boys are deeply in love, and having the time of their young lives!”

  It looked more as if they were sleeping when we came to our secret beach the next day and found that it was no longer that: the newcomers were lying on the sand near our usual spot as we emerged from the grove of sea grape trees. We stood there for a moment gazing at them. Then Dennis said: “I was wrong. They’re not gay.”

  “And why do you say that?” said Kent.

  “Because their towels aren’t touching. Lovers always lay their towels down so that they’re touching.”

  The one thing we couldn’t do was ask; so instead, to advertise our presence, we ran into the ocean; and when we emerged from the water they were gone.

  “You see? Not gay,” said Dennis as he walked back wiping the water from his eyes. “They didn’t want three old queens staring at them.”

  “Is that what we are to them?” said Kent.

  “Yes. Age is relative, you know. It’s like the beach in Mexico I went to,” said Dennis, getting out the cheese and crackers, “at their age. I was still in college, traveling with friends from school. We went to this island off the coast of Yucatán, which nobody went to then—and walked miles to get to this beach the locals had told us about. Walked and walked and walked. Climbed cliffs, coral cliffs, trudged and trudged till our feet were raw, and then, when we finally got to the most beautiful beach in the world, there, at the farthest end, were these two men lying in hammocks—who looked exactly alike! The same height, same body, same tan, same hair, same bathing suits, and reading the same book—a life of Betty Grable! We had come all the way to this tiny island off the coast of Mexico, walked barefoot over coral to get to this legendary beach, and what did we find? Two queens from West Hollywood! I wanted to have nothing to do with them. Now,” he said, handing us our crackers and cheese, “flash forward many years. Here we are on this beautiful beach. Only this time we sent them screaming. It’s the oldest story in the book! You fly in a jet, take a boat to an island that isn’t even on the map, hike for hours, finally reach the most beautiful beach in the world, and what do you find? Two decorators in white bikinis reading the life of Betty Grable.”

  “But why would they think we’re queens?” I said.

  “Why not?” said Dennis. “We’re not wearing six scarves and a quarter pound of jewelry from Fortunoff like that number singing Rodgers and Hammerstein last night, but we are three gents of a certain age together on a beach in the tropics. Which is why I’d love it if you took a photo of us right now,” he said, turning to me. “The light is so pretty, and we’re not plastered with seaweed.”

  “Well,” said Kent, “this island is quite big enough for all of us, wouldn’t you say?”

  And with that the sobering sensation of viewing ourselves through the eyes of others vanished, and we lay down and stared at the wedge of white sand between two coral cliffs whose beauty made us forget these petty, snobbish matters. An hour later the honeymooners began playing a game called Elevator, in which each one would dive down, push up off the sea bottom, and scream, as they burst up out of the water: “Lingerie!” or “Sixth floor, Menswear!” That evening we were so tired at dinner we were not even thinking about the newcomers until the handsome one said good evening as he passed our table and asked how our day had been.

  “Wonderful,” said Dennis. “I hope we didn’t drive you off the beach.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “We wanted to check out some more places on the base. Really beautiful,” he said, and then with a nod and a smile he went to the table in the corner, where his companion was already boring a hole into the menu.

  “I have a new theory,” said Kent. “The pretty one is not gay, but the other one, who won’t even look at us, is. Why else would he avoid us so strenuously? Only people who suspect homosexuality in themselves react adversely to other homos. The genuine heterosexual is indifferent. The one with the braces, however, seems extremely uncomfortable in our presence.”

  “Very uncomfortable,” said Dennis.

  “Self-conscious and ill at ease,” said Kent. “And depressed.” After a few more minutes of soporific silence, he leaned forward and hissed: “I’ve got it! The boy with the braces is not only secretly gay, but in love with his friend, who isn’t!”

  “Could that be it?” said Dennis.

  “It would explain why the boy with the braces only looks at his friend,” said Kent, “and has no desire to talk to anyone else. It would explain why their towels weren’t together. It would explain how unhappy the boy with the braces seems. If I were barely twenty-one, tall and skinny, with braces on my teeth, and in love with a friend who was everything I wasn’t and wanted to be, and who could not be in love with me, because he was straight, I’d be miserable, too! In fact,” he said, “I was all those things, minus the braces, at his age. I was so depressed I went to bed for an entire week after graduation because I and my best friend had to part. He went to Kenya to work, and I went home to my parents, where I went upstairs to my room and lay in bed for seven days, because as far as I was concerned, life had come to a complete end.”

  “Poor baby,” said Dennis, putting his hand on his boyfriend’s.

  “But now look at me,” said Kent as he put his hand on top of Dennis’s.

  “Of course,” he added, “the friendly one does have a superb body.”

  “He has a body that would sink ships,” said Dennis. “I’d kill for his stomach. And chest. And shoulders. You know, the awful thing about the gym is there is really nothing you can do for shoulders. Not really.”

  “The other one has a beautiful body, too,” I said. “In fact, I find him really more attractive.”

  “That’s because you like nerds,” said Dennis.

  I did like nerds; which meant the memory of his white, lanky body shifting on his towel in the sunlight, before they were aware of our presence, was with me now—though glance as I might across the room, he would not return the look. They sat there in silence, like a married couple who have been together such a long time they have run out of things to say, and then, just when it seemed they must look around the room to find a topic of interest, their conversation resumed—though the boy with the braces retained his melancholy mask.

  “You know, if there has been any advantage to the past ten years,” said Dennis, “it’s been that I’ve learned not to pine over people who can’t possibly return my interest. One simply accepts the fact and moves on. But when you’re nineteen, or whatever he is, you don’t know that. You can’t move on. You’re terrified to move on, because moving on may mean—ending up like us! That’s why he refuses to look at or speak to us. He wants nothing to do with queens—all he wants in this world is his friend—which I can perfectly understand, though I’d love to walk right over there now and tell him we know what he’s going through.”

  “That love is like a wasting wound,” I said, “no tropic sun can cure.”

  “I think that s
cans,” Kent said. “It does, doesn’t it? That love is like a wasting wound no tropic sun can cure! We should go over right now and tell him that!”

  “Well, why don’t you?” said Dennis.

  “Because we are all trapped in social rules, rules that maintain propriety and privacy,” said Kent, as he picked up his wine. “On the other hand, I think of that lovely line of Rilke’s. Rilke said the world is filled with dragons only waiting for us to kiss them to be changed into princesses.”

  “What a divine idea!” said Dennis, and, with this thought, they stared into one another’s eyes, and then turned their gazes on the table in the corner. The couple in question chose that moment, however, to get up and leave the dining room. The outgoing one smiled at us as they passed; the boy with the braces stared down at the tiles as if being led off to jail. At that moment the stage manager in the corner put his head back and began to sing, in one of those rich, quavering voices you hear only in piano bars, “Full moooon and empty arms ...”

  “I can’t believe it,” whispered Dennis as the stage manager threw up his arms with a jangle of jewelry on his wrists.

  We watched as Peggy came out with a tray of flan and delivered the cups to all the tables.

  “I am thinking of another line,” said Kent drunkenly, “this one from a letter by Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter. It goes: ‘All life has is youth, or the love of youth in others.’”

  Dennis looked up from his custard.

  “Was Fitzgerald a chicken queen?” he said.

  “He was a romantic!” Kent said: “The same thing, I suppose. The point is we love the mystery couple because they’re young—and innocent. But the boy with braces came here to be alone with his friend—not to be leered at by us.”

  “Speak for yourself!” said the stage manager, who seemed to think the distance between our tables immaterial. “What you want to tell them is—there’s nothing to be afraid of! I’ve never been happier than I am now! I’m on this beautiful island having the time of my life! And when I go back to New York I love my life there, too! You know? It’s more fun, in fact, than it is at their age, in many ways, when you’re worried about so many stupid things. But try telling them that! Try telling that to people who look at you and see only one thing—old age and death!” At this he cackled, stood up in his aquamarine caftan, spread his arms out like a great bird opening his wings, and left the dining room.