And right then Glenn came. I mean came. Turned me over on my back and really thrust that thing down and shuddered and groaned for about five minutes. He always enjoyed his orgasms but this was special. And for once, this was rare, he didn’t seem to care if I had come or not. I hadn’t. This whole thing had been much too fascinating to get sexually worked up. He really got off on shooting his father. Freud or Jung or one of those guys would have had a field day with Glenn. He certainly wasn’t repressing anything. Hated Dad. Shot Dad. Wow.
As he kind of returned to the land of the living I said from where I was lying half-smothered under him, “So, what happened?”
“Nothing much. They lived. You know that. They didn’t press charges and that was before the press got hold of things and made them into a circus. My mother took me to Short Hills the next day and left me with my grandparents. Never told them what happened. And I didn’t see my father again until I came back here. About the time you met me.”
He sort of shook his head, pulled himself out from between my legs and sat up on the edge of the bed. I crawled over and hugged him. “This must be love,” he said, “When we feel like hugging each other one minute after we fuck.”
“I don’t know about you, but this is love as far as I’m concerned,” I said. He pulled me around in front of him and kind of held me in his arms as though I was a very large baby. Which I loved of course.
“No. It never got in the papers. My mother and I hardly spoke about it. I think she was kind of proud of me for taking things into my own hands. It sure said a lot about how much I wanted to stay with her. I think as soon as the police heard kidnapping, they didn’t give a damn about my father. And here he is. Still in Miami Beach. Still gambling. Wearing all these old clothes that are kind of yellow with age. Bell-bottom pants and those kind of plastic loafers. With matching belt. He didn’t ever really care for me. Nobody could ever break up that big love affair he was always having with himself. Now he just hits me up for money from time to time and I just pay his rent so he doesn’t throw it away on those card games that are still going on.”
Now I really had to go home, and I felt kind of bad getting dressed and leaving him there by himself. But he had some sort of business date and was heading into the shower when I left. He gave me a big hug and really kissed me. And right. It did make me feel terrible. It wasn’t so much that we were guys as that I was just too young. If I was maybe ten years older this might have been the great love affair of the century because we did love each other. To prove it, only when I was going down those varnished yellow wood stairs of his did it pass through my mind, my boyfriend is someone who shot his father when he was eight years old.
hugo sees magenta
The next time I went to Glenn’s apartment I really had something to think about. The magenta lipstick I found in his bathroom. You wonder if it’s your mother’s and you open it and you see it’s magenta. A color she never wears. And your little mind goes click, click, click. And out comes Estelle. Our little office secretary. This is really boring.
A couple of weeks ago when I ran past the office to do a little cleaning and Mom was out, Estelle cornered me. She said, “You know that Mr. Paul your mother is going out with?”
“Yes, Estelle, I do know Mr. Paul. We call him Glenn.” I wondered if she was going to ask me if I was going out with him, too. I wouldn’t put it past her. She is very smart, our Estelle. You can count on her to notice everything.
“Mr. Paul is trying to get me to see him.”
“So,” I said.
“I don’t think that is very, should I say, correct.”
“Well, he’s not married to Mom. I don’t suppose there’s any law against him going out with more than one person.” That certainly was true. And I could swear to it.
“Even so, I wouldn’t like it if the situation were reversed. If I was the boss and your mom was my secretary, I would not like it at all if my boyfriend was coming on to her.”
“I can understand that,” I said, “but I’m not going to discuss this with Mom. This is the sort of thing that has to sort itself out.” I’m so, so wise. I must have seen all this stuff on daytime TV. “You have to decide this for yourself, Estelle.” Is there anybody in this town he doesn’t want to fuck?
“Well, I’ve been telling him no. Besides, he’s not Hispanic, you know.”
“Well, gee, Estelle, you wouldn’t hold that against him, would you? You must have gone out with someone who wasn’t Hispanic before.”
“Once. I didn’t like it.”
“Was he as cute as Glenn Paul?” I can really be a bitch when I want to be.
“No.” She was getting ready to drop the subject. She went back to her desk. Estelle is very pretty and she was looking particularly pretty in a new magenta blouse. She had bought lipstick that matched it exactly. Her hair was kind of piled up on top of her head false carelessly. Her nail enamel didn’t match exactly. You had to give her that, she’s not a floozy.
“This is between Mr. Paul and you, Estelle. If you think he’s cute, go for it. Of course, if you do, and I ever find out about it, I’m going to hate you both forever.” She looked up at me to see if I was kidding. I wasn’t sure if I was or not and I thought I’d just let her think about it.
And here I was leaving that shithead’s apartment with her magenta lipstick in my pocket. Nothing is by chance. Even if she didn’t mean to, that lipstick was left behind for somebody to stumble upon.
So what do I do? I go straight to Mom’s office hoping she’s not there. She isn’t. But Estelle is. She’s wearing a white linen dress. No magenta, obviously. As I pass her desk I put the lipstick down and say pleasantly, “This must be yours.” Silence. She’s typing. She finishes what she’s doing without even looking up. Then she says, “What were you doing at his apartment?” and I realize I have made a big mistake. Huge. Hugo the huge mistake maker. “I was just passing by.”
“I’ll bet.” Estelle got up from her desk, straightened the papers on it, looked at her watch. “I’m going to leave a little early today, Hugo. I’m not feeling all that great. I’m not going to quit. I wouldn’t do that to your mom. I really like her. Nothing has happened that she needs to know about. You know, the fact that he’s not Hispanic is a very big problem. Too big for me.” She left. Then came back in and said, “Hugo.” Then said nothing. And she was out of there again.
Leaving me to sit at her desk and think about how dumb I was. How could I have possibly thought she wouldn’t immediately figure out I was in Glenn’s bathroom? That’s elementary. And now she was another one who had a clue I was fooling around with Glenn. Plus Macha, plus Ken. This whole thing was getting tense. Then Mom came in. She was looking very cool in a dark orange linen jacket and a brown linen skirt. With brown and white shoes. Spectator pumps. So adorable. So Italian. I love my mom.
“Where is the ever dependable Estelle?”
“She had to go home. She was feeling a little under the weather.”
“But she never feels under the weather. That’s so unlike her.”
For a minute I considered telling her the whole thing. That Estelle was sleeping with Glenn Paul. That I was sleeping with Glenn Paul. For all I knew half of Miami Beach was sleeping with Glenn Paul. I really wanted to burst into tears and sit on her lap and crumple up all her linen and have her tell me that everything was going to turn out all right. I almost did. But then I thought of Glenn and I knew that would be kaput for all of us with Glenn. He was the wedge between my mom and me. And suddenly I was somebody else. I really left the womb once and for all sitting there in her office looking at my beautiful mom. “Let’s go home,” I said. I had that hard knot feeling at the back of my throat like you want to cry and you can’t.
new york
It was spring. The rainy season was coming nearer. I was going by Mr. Paul’s apartment from time to time to get laid. My grades were pretty good. And Macha and I were talking about going to college. We had to make some decisions now if we were h
oping to get into a decent school in a year from next fall.
Macha’s father was taking her to Harvard, where he had gone to school, as well as Brown and the University of Pennsylvania. She wasn’t so determined to be an actress anymore and was talking about being a lawyer.
“You could come with us, Hugo,” she said. “That would give you some idea of what these colleges are like.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’d like to go to school in New York. I could be a writer or a journalist or work in advertising or something. I don’t really want a career. I just want to live in some sort of romantic wild way.
“Should I work in a bank?” I said.
Macha said, “I think that’s quite a reach, considering you’re so terrible in math. And besides, it would be too fascinating. You don’t deserve it. So go ahead, be a journalist. Or a fashion writer. Or something like that.” Macha was getting bored with this conversation. She was trying real hard these days to be conventional and see herself as a high school junior. I know my life, which she knew all about, was making her wonder if she was getting a slow start in life. But we both knew it was dumb to let older people just use you up because you’re young and nice-looking. And without an education we’d never get to be one of those older people trying to use up younger, nice-looking people. Which seems to be the whole point, doesn’t it?
I asked Mom what she thought at dinner that night. I guess my whole idea of living in New York came from her talking about when she lived there as a model. Sort of the center of all that was glamorous and exciting. Where everything came from that the rest of the world used as ideas.
She knew more about going to school there than I thought she would. “You could go to Columbia. It’s sort of ratty but it’s a good school. And after you’ve been there a couple of years you could decide if you want to study journalism or just do a degree in English literature. That could be good, too. Or you could go to Parsons School of Design if you think you might want to go into fashion. But I think you’re probably too intellectual for that. You could probably work on Seventh Avenue tomorrow and do just fine.” I noticed how much she got the picture on me. Probably a lot more than I realized. And I always thought I was being so foxy.
Glenn Elliott came by to take Mom to the movies and she started talking about it with him. He was looking particularly hot in a blue blazer. Linen. Kind of lightish blue that made his eyes really bright. “I could take Hugo,” he said. “I’ve got business to do in New York. We could go up in a couple of weeks. Figure it out, Hugo, and we’ll go. When’s your spring vacation?”
“The end of the month, but I don’t want to miss work,” I told them.
“We’ll go in the middle of the week. Like a Monday through a Wednesday or Thursday. How does that sound?” Mom thought it was a great idea.
I got the picture right away. He wanted to go somewhere and really get down, which I didn’t disagree with. But I wondered how Mom could possibly not figure it out. I suspect that fold-out couch bed at Glenn Elliott’s must be seeing plenty of activity. Mr. Glenn Elliott Paul. Providing sex to an entire family. Sort of a Florence Nightingale of sex. What a great guy.
So I called Columbia and Parsons and they asked me to write letters, which I did, and they answered them and it was set for me to go up on my spring break. I was beginning to find the whole thing kind of boring and I hadn’t even gone yet. I stopped by the Bomber Club, but the guys at the club were really excited at the idea of my going to college. They all wanted to go and had all kinds of plans about what they could do with their lives.
When I told them I was interviewing at Parsons, that really got them going. Myrtle Beach wanted to be like Bob Mackie and design for the stars. Coco wanted to be an interior decorator, which surprised me. He knew all about Memphis in Milan and Philippe Starck and the Paramount and the Royalton in New York, and Ian Schrager had almost bought the Eden Roc to do the same thing in Miami Beach. Maximum Shell, who doesn’t talk much, admitted that he was going to night school preparing to be an architect. Could any of these things happen? Could be. This is a tough little bunch of characters here at the Bomber Club.
Glenn Elliott took care of where we would stay in New York. He said he knew a little place in the Village and it would be quite inexpensive and we could share a room to save even more money. Uh-huh. Ugga-ugga-ugga. Yuk-yuk-yuk. I bought my own ticket from my savings account.
It turns out we were staying at a kind of bed and breakfast without the breakfast called the Centra. It was a couple of old houses put together with rooms and staircases running off in all directions. Our room was sort of down a few steps from the street. It was called the Tack Room as it had been originally part of the stables of the old house. A double bed, of course.
Mr. Gawain was the owner. He looked like he’d melted a little bit. His blue eyes sagged slightly at the corners, his face was slipping slightly off the front of his head, and his body was slipping slightly off his skeleton. The baseball cap worn backward didn’t help a bit. And the shorts and tank top were definitely negatives. What is it with those tank tops? The only people who look really good in them have great builds, and they never wear them. But it’s kind of the official summer uniform of the aging raver. Why is it people think if they show it, it must be good? There’s something so vulnerable about where the arm meets the torso. It always looks so sort of babyish unless you’re in peak form, and that’s in the front where the pecs hit. In the back it always looks like a rag doll. It’s the one spot where nature couldn’t get the design right.
Mr. Gawain had that kind of floppy toy look. He seemed to know Glenn Elliott and was very roguish with him as he showed us our room. But then I suspect that half the Eastern Seaboard knows Glenn Elliott. Mr. Gawain exited from our room through a door at the back. He said this led to his dining room.
“I’ll lock it on the other side so you don’t have to worry about being raped or anything,” he leered.
“It’s the ‘anything’ I worry about,” I told him. His bleary blue eyes looked mystified and he fled.
I saw his digs later. He had a bedroom and dining room right next to our room. Upstairs was the living room that also doubled as the sort of boardinghouse lobby. It had a grand piano. I could occasionally hear Mr. Gawain playing snatches from the Moonlight Sonata. I think he saw himself as a kind of Blanche Dubois-style hostess and let his assistant, Theresa, take care of all the real work of booking rooms and collecting bills while he carried on his fantasy of living in a large house where he entertained hordes of wonderful guests, all there to amuse him. The wonderful guests weren’t much to be seen but the steady scurrying of feet on the stairs and murmuring of voices passing the door testified to their presence. The few I saw looked like provincial gay guys from Toronto out on a fling. Or the occasional tortured type, staring soulfully at you as you passed, hoping to be taken right there on the hall parquet, I suppose.
As soon as Mr. Gawain pulled the door shut Glenn Elliott wanted to tussle and I was sort of in the mood myself. It was kind of exciting being there on that rickety old Victorian bed with all our clothes off while people’s feet passed by just outside the flimsy casement curtain by our heads. Tackiness is sexy, no doubt about it.
Glenn Elliott seemed to know his way around this part of town. We ate down on Hudson Street at The Sazerac House. A dark cavern kind of place. Our waiter was a flighty kind of person who said to the bartender, “Oh, don’t talk to me that way, George, when you know I’m so vulnerable right now.” He wasn’t someone you’d really want to sleep with, but he looked like he’d be fun to know.
Then we went back to the Centra and fell asleep in each other’s arms. I don’t think Glenn Elliott really had anything to do in New York at all.
At least there didn’t seem to be anything on his schedule. He went up to Columbia with me the next morning and everybody seemed to accept him as my young-looking father. I talked to the people in the registrar’s office and they seemed to think if my SAT scores were okay
I’d have no trouble entering a pre-journalism course. We walked around the campus and visited a dorm and it seemed pretty cool. I had this idea that everyone would have short hair and look like something out of a 1950s movie. But they looked fine. Or not fine, if you know what I mean. Lots of ponytails and black jeans. Actually, I could kind of see myself there.
We were scheduled to go down to Parsons in the afternoon and that was something else altogether. The girls looked good but a lot of the boys were really swishy. I could tell Glenn Elliott was not at all enjoying himself. A lot of the boys were eyeing us, and I don’t think a lot of them got the father-son picture. Why should they?
We walked back from Parsons to our room. It was very pretty, the Village, at that time of year. The trees had little tiny leaves hovering around the branches like swarms of little green insects, throwing pale, broken-up shadows across the red brick houses, the iron stair railings, and the heaving, broken sidewalks.
“Thank you for bringing me up here,” I said. Glenn Elliott put his arm around my shoulder and said, “I wanted to do it.”
“You didn’t really have anything to do here, did you?” I asked.
“I just sort of wanted to look around,” he said. “I used to live here and I wondered if it was still the same. If I would want to live here again.”
“Would you?” It made me a little frightened to ask.
“No, not really. My life is in Miami Beach now. With your mother and you.”
My Worst Date Page 13