by Mark McNease
They renovated the old inn and re-christened it Pride Lodge. They added on to the main two-story building until it had eight guest rooms on the first floor and six on the second, along with what they called the Master Suite, where the two of them lived. The Lodge boasted a functioning restaurant and bar adjoining the main room, which everyone called the “great room,” complete with fireplace, wide-screen television, three mahogany book shelves to give the space a library feel, and a check-in desk where you could buy the usual rainbow paraphernalia, along with a Pride Lodge sweatshirt and baseball cap, should you be in the market for souvenirs. Three years into the venture, when they realized it was going to succeed, they added a swimming pool, and two years after that they had six cabins built, each with two spacious “luxury” rooms that included kitchenettes and private baths. They had the inn’s cavernous basement sound-proofed and converted half into a piano bar called Clyde’s and half into a karaoke room. The combined entertainment had the effect of bringing in locals for dinner and a night out, helping to swell the numbers without having to add more rooms. The whole undertaking took five years, but once it was completed it was a sight to behold: a resort for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and more than a few transgender visitors, well before the term had been officially coined. Back then everyone just called it a gay resort, with the knowledge that all were welcome, including the occasional, befuddled heterosexual couple who pulled into the driveway because they liked the name of the place. Most of them politely drove on once they got to the desk and realized there was something different going on here. Maybe it was the two slightly masculine women sitting by the fireplace, or the restaurant hostess with the Adam’s apple, but now and then they stayed and were made to feel as much at home as any other guest.
Pucky was the ringmaster, the chatty, gregarious captain of this strange and colorful ship. A diminutive man at five-five, he had a habit of keeping his hair dyed strawberry blond and wearing a collection of eyeglasses to rival a young Elton John’s. He wore Hawaiian shirts in the summer and high-end casual short-sleeved shirts the rest of the year, always with long pants. Pucky didn’t like his legs; he thought they were too chickeny, as he called them, and he never exposed them in public. He was the face of Pride Lodge, the official greeter, taskmaster of a ragtag staff, and the table floater at dinner who went from guest to guest asking how their food was, if their rooms were up to snuff, and if there was anything at all he could help them with, excluding the sexual encounters some of the guests hoped for after an hour or two at the bar. That, Pucky discreetly let them know, was up to them. He was many things, with many hats, but a pimp was not one of them.
Stu had met Pucky when they were both in the United States Navy stationed at the Naval Air Station in Key West. Had it been up to Stu they would still be living there. He much preferred the tropical climate of the Florida Keys, but even more important to him was the man he’d fallen in love with and to whom he’d committed his life way back in 1972. A world away, a time removed, when Vietnam was still unresolved and an American president had yet to resign in disgrace.
Stu was silence to Pucky’s noise, calm to Pucky’s chaos. He stayed in the background, even though everyone knew who he was. Stu did the Lodge’s books and looked after the financial end of things. He liked that. He was a thinker, a lover of novels and quietude. Running Pride Lodge might seem like an odd choice for a man who preferred the company of only one person, but it worked well for Stu. He had life in the country. He had Pucky to look after the guests and keep the occasional madness away from him. And he had a companion for life, his one great treasure. It made aging, going bald, feeling his knees begin to buckle and the weight slowly add to his once tall, slender frame, not quite so discomfiting.
One morning three years ago Stu was taking his dawn constitutional, as he called it, walking around the grounds as the sun was just beginning to rise. He would have a single cup of de-caffeinated coffee in the Suite’s kitchen while it was still dark out; then he would put on his coat if the weather was chill, as it had been that September, and he would walk slowly around the cabins, along the periphery of the property and back up past the pool, climbing the stairs that led to the Lodge as the sun was ascended the morning sky. That was where they found him, on the stairs, almost at the top, as if, had he made it three more steps, he would still be alive. His heart had stopped, outlasted by his knees and every other part of him, as he made his way slowly up the stairs. The one small mercy was that Ricki, the long-time desk manager, night time restaurant hostess and summer pool boy—if you can call a 50-year-old man a boy—was the one who found him. Ricki slept very little, which helped explain how he managed to be so many things to so many people, and it was his habit to drive in from his home in Lambertville, across the river in New Jersey, and clean the bars first thing in the morning. When he parked his car that day he noticed what looked like a red jacket on the steps leading up to the Lodge. At first he assumed someone had had too much to drink the night before and lost their jacket, but then he noticed a pair of beige pants running below the jacket and an arm stuck straight out to the side, and he suddenly realized it was a person, lying face down and motionless. He rushed over to find Stu, dead with his glasses cracked on his face from where he’d hit the step, those stupid old black horn-rims Pucky had been on him for years to replace. He rolled Stu over and, not knowing the first thing about CPR, tried to save him anyway, stopping in the frantic effort to shout, “Help! Help! Somebody help!”
Pucky tried to carry on without Stu but everyone could tell it wasn’t going to work. He stopped greeting people, he stopped paying attention to detail, and within a few months he stopped caring altogether. He decided to sell Pride Lodge and retire to Key West. The one other place he knew Stu loved and would probably have preferred to live, but he had loved Pucky even more. He would sell the Lodge, where his heart had stopped on those steps as surely as Stu’s had, and he would go to the southernmost end of the country, buy a small condo, and live out his life with his memories.
Word spread quickly that Pucky was selling. Fear set in among the regulars that the famed and beloved Pride Lodge would end up in the hands of a developer who cared not a whit for its history, and the collective memory of all the friends and guests who had stayed there would quickly fade, blown away as easily and dismissively as ash.
That was when Sid Stanhope and Dylan Tremblay stepped in. Ten years apart in age, with Sid the older at sixty-two that year, they were long-time guests of the Lodge who drove in from their home in Long Branch, New Jersey, several times a year to spend long weekends. Sid was about ready to retire from his job as an assistant bank manager, having hoped the past five years not to be laid off; he saw this as a golden opportunity to get out before he was pushed out, despite the tragic circumstances that had the Lodge on the market. Dylan had never been content to begin with, job hopping his entire adult life until he found his job of the last six years selling men’s clothes in a store whose only claim to fame was having survived in Long Branch. The boardwalk there had been built up over the last decade, with high-end condos along the shore. Life in Long Branch wasn’t quite the depressing reality it had been, but the chance to get out? To buy Pride Lodge and live out their lives there, as Pucky and Stu had? It was just the sort of luck, that accident of timing, you could wait for most of your life. When it happened you had to act. Sid and Dylan acted, and two years later, as they decorated the Lodge for another Halloween, they still thought it was the best move they’d ever made.
Chapter 2
Cabin 6
Kyle Callahan and Danny Durban arrived at Pride Lodge late on Thursday night. This was their fifth Halloween at the Lodge and an event they both looked forward to months in advance. The couple had spent three long weekends each year there for the five years they’d been together, one for each season excluding winter. As lovely as the Pennsylvania countryside was, Kyle and Danny both found it too bare, too cold and stark in the winter months.
They’d found Prid
e Lodge by accident their first summer together, after Kyle suggested they go away for a weekend and began a brief internet search of gay bed and breakfasts within driving distance of their apartment in Manhattan. Pride Lodge popped up, just 90 minutes by rental car. While it was much larger than a traditional B&B, it instantly became one of their favorite getaways, and five years later they’d made the drive again as October came to a close and the Halloween festivities promised friendship, fun and an escape for them both from the pressures of their lives in the City.
Ricki was just about to go off desk duty when they arrived at nearly eleven o’clock that night. He knew all the regular guests and was delighted to see them, even though he’d known they were coming. Several other guests had arrived early as well and a few were having drinks by the fireplace as Kyle and Danny checked in and got the key for Cabin 6. They always stayed in Cabin 6. For one thing, it was one of the luxury rooms, with its own television, kitchenette and bathroom; it was also well away and just down the road, giving the roomers a greater sense of privacy. The cabins were surrounded by trees in back and a long private drive in front. Most of the people who stayed at Pride Lodge were older. It just wasn’t the kind of place young LGBT travelers went to for a good time: too remote, too sedate, and too, well, old. The perfect hideaway for mature gay men, lesbian couples and singles looking to be comfortable exposing their 40 or 50 or 60-year-old bodies in a bathing suit, or sitting around a restaurant bar chatting with other people who remembered music from the 1970s when it was new and who would not likely be spending their time tweeting, linking in or obsessively checking their smart phones for texts and celebrity news flashes.
The other reason they always stayed in Cabin 6 was the painting: a beautiful dark-haired woman in a flowing red dress sitting at a black grand piano in front of a fireplace. She looked as if she were frozen in the 1940s, and appeared to be posing at the piano more than actually playing it. There was sheet music in front of her, but only one’s imagination could decide what the music was. Classical, most certainly, given the elegance of the woman and the room. It was clearly a reproduction, something that must surely be hanging in thousands of homes and hotel rooms around the world, but Kyle had only ever seen it in one other place—above his mother’s piano in the home he had grown up in in Highland Park, Illinois. His mother moved to a condo in Chicago after his father’s death and she had taken the picture with her. Kyle, never a superstitious man, took the painting’s presence as some kind of message, as if his parents were giving their blessing in a discreet but very unusual way. Kyle made sure he and Danny stayed in Cabin 6 every visit after that.
Kyle met Danny when both men were forty-seven, with just six months separating them. Danny, being the older of the pair, joked that theirs was a May-June romance. They stumbled upon one another, literally, at a photography exhibit at the Katherine Pride Gallery in Chelsea’s Meatpacking District. Kyle had gone because of his love for photography and his passion as an amateur photographer, and to support a friend who was having the exhibit. Danny had gone because the owner of the gallery, Katherine Pride, had recently become a customer at Margaret’s Passion, the long-time Gramercy Park restaurant where Danny was the day manager. It was the kind of personal touch Margaret’s was known for, securing in return a legendary loyalty to the restaurant and to Margaret herself. The only meat to be found in the Meatpacking District these days came on very high-priced plates at restaurants with names like Sacrosanct and Tiberius. The area had once housed butchers feeding the citizens of New York City; now it was all upscale eateries, art galleries and clothing stores. Danny had come around a corner, studying the photographs on the wall, and accidentally bumped into Kyle, spilling both their drinks. Their eyes met an instant before their smiles, and five years later they were still together.
Kyle was by most measures an average looking man: oval face, large nose, pale blue eyes. His hair had been blond as a child but had long since turned brown, and he kept it cropped close to his skull, in part to downplay a receding hairline. He dressed in slacks and button-down shirts, in and out of the office, not liking the heaviness of blue jeans even on vacation; and his one surrender to fashion was his glasses: progressive, transitional, bifocal Ray-Bans that just about everyone said were the coolest glasses they’d seen.
Danny was the more outgoing of the two. He was also six inches shorter than Kyle, who was not a particularly tall man. It was a height difference Kyle never noticed except when he saw pictures of them together. Danny was the talker, Kyle the brooder. Danny preferred shorts outside his job in all but the coldest weather, and would throw on a sweatshirt or sweater to compensate for a chill. He liked being as casual as possible outside the restaurant where he had worked for the past ten years. He was top talent, keeping Margaret’s customers happy, familiar and returning. Margaret Bowman was a real person. Cheerful, birdlike and nearing 80, she seldom came down to the restaurant anymore from her apartment above it on East 21st Street, but when she did she always caused a stir. She would go slowly from table to table saying hello to people who had known and loved her for years. She asked how their children and grandchildren were; if there was a young couple dining she would remark on how lovely they looked together. If they were single, divorced, or even grieving the loss of a loved one, Margaret somehow knew and would say exactly the right thing. She had lost her husband Gerard to a freak traffic accident several years back and had no children, and she considered Danny the son she’d always wanted.
Kyle was the personal assistant to Imogene Landis, a high-maintenance, high-octane, high-profile television reporter whose star had been falling steadily for the past five years, which is exactly how long Kyle had worked for her. It seems she had found the best assistant she’d ever had—or at least the most persevering—just as her career began its slow slide into the tank of obscurity. Before Kyle, no one had lasted more than a year working for Imogene, and for that determination and loyalty she repaid him by being as needy, intrusive and inappropriate as she possibly could. Kyle suspected her current job, as a special English-language correspondent on financial affairs for Tokyo Pulse, a third-tier Japanese cable show produced by Japan TV3, was the last stop on this train. She’d be editing copy or selling Avon if she blew this one. He thought she knew it, too, which was why she leaned on him more than ever and why he allowed it.
“Please turn your phone off,” Danny said as they rolled their luggage into Cabin 6. He knew the third person on every vacation they took was Imogene and he wanted her left in Manhattan; that included limiting her digital reach, ignoring her texts and letting her go to voicemail.
“Just let me check the emails, then I’ll turn it off for the night. I promise.”
“For the night? We’re not just here for the night.”
“She’s at the Stock Exchange tomorrow morning, it’s a very big deal for her.”
“In the background! She’s a prop, Kyle, she’s not ringing the bell.”
“Be kind. The show airs in Tokyo.”
“A re-run at 3:00 am. On cable, with Japanese sub-titles. She doesn’t speak a word of the language.”
“Of course not, that’s why they hired her! She’s an English-language correspondent. Do I need to explain what that is?”
Danny glared at Kyle. “I know what an English-language correspondent is,” he said slowly, causing Kyle to blush. “I know what a good one is, too.”
Kyle started to protest in defense of his boss, but Danny cut him off with a wave of his hand. “It’s great she’s learning Japanese, it really is,” Danny said. “She’ll be able to tell her bosses to fuck off in their own language, maybe do a proper bow with it before they fire her.”
“She’s learned her lesson.”
“Several times.”
Danny saw the hurt on Kyle’s face. “I’m sorry. I know you’re devoted to her, but she’s not the one you’re marrying. And she’ll get over the trauma of standing three people to the side, back row I’m sure, at the opening bell of the St
ock Exchange. She can be your best man . . . or best woman or however it’s done with gay people.”
The two men had been talking about marriage since the law passed in New York. They’d been cautious, not wanting to get caught up in the emotions of the moment. They decided against rushing down to City Hall as they thought many couples had without really thinking it through. But they were in negotiations, so to speak.
Danny began hanging his shirts in the closet and putting his underwear, socks and sundries in the top dresser drawer.
Kyle rolled his suitcase into a corner by the nightstand on his side of the bed. He tended to vacation out of his suitcase and was never in a hurry to unpack. This was not their apartment, and he figured the task of hanging up shirts and pants could wait until morning. His real concern was his camera. He’d upgraded to a Nikon D3100. At $600 it wasn’t all that top of the line, but it was the best he’d ever had and he was extremely protective of it, treating it the way a violinist might treat a Stradivarius. He had been in love with photography since his father gave him a new camera for his fortieth birthday. Late in life to find a passion, but not too late.
Kyle checked his camera to make sure he had the battery charger and the USB cable to upload photos to his laptop. He’d checked at home before they left, but these were the sorts of small details people tended to run through their minds over and over: Did I turn the stove off, did I lock the door? Once he confirmed he had not forgotten anything, he sat on the edge of the bed and took out his phone. He scrolled through his emails and saw that Danny was right, as he knew he would be. Seven emails from Imogene, all stealth with subject lines like, “HAVE A GREAT TIME!” and “TAKE LOTS OF PIX FOR ME!” She had never accepted that all-caps was bad form. And below the screaming demands that he enjoy himself she would type something frantic, urgent, or personal-time-interrupting. Kyle had been onto this trick for years but she still thought he fell for it.