From our first meeting what struck me most viscerally about Richard and Susan was their languor. Whenever Carey and I went to visit them, for instance, they seemed always just to be getting out of bed. Sometimes a diaphragm lay quivering on their kitchen table—further proof, I thought, of the degree to which they had thrown off outmoded niceties. (Today such a gesture strikes me as pure exhibitionism.) Also, though both of them were ostensibly graduate students (Richard in law, Susan in French) they showed no evidence, at least in my presence, of studying. Like their cats, they were sinuous and wayward.
At first Susan herself disappointed me a little. This was because Carey’s descriptions, before I met her, had led me to expect a modernday Circe, whose beauty and charisma could reduce men to swine; instead of which here was this stoop-shouldered girl with rubicund, slightly spotty cheeks, big hips, and unshaven armpits the odor of which mingled curiously with the oils she was always dabbing on her neck—utterly unremarkable, I thought, especially when compared to Richard, who was classically good-looking in a Mayflower sort of way. And yet perhaps it is a mistake to assume that Circe must be beautiful. After all, she was a witch. She had charm, in the most old-fashioned sense of the word. So did Susan. Most of it came down to smoke and mirrors, I am convinced now, a brilliant mix of motherliness and glamour that beguiled men, and to which women remained utterly indifferent; not that this mattered, for like Marge, Susan was the sort of woman for whom the opinions of other women are largely irrelevant.
Richard was mild, even shy, in comparison. Smaller than Susan, he had fine, chestnut-colored hair, a snub nose, skin that burned easily in the summer: in short, just the sort of complexion that you would expect from a boy with an unblemished Anglo-Saxon pedigree, whose mother could trace her ancestry to a fourteenth-century Scottish laird. As children, people like Richard, when they are asked to draw their family trees, find themselves faced with a snarled root structure that goes back centuries, even intertwining, at times, with crucial historical events, such as the beheading of queens. Susan, on the other hand, came from a cutting. Beyond her immigrant grandparents she knew nothing of her ancestors, which did not mean that the offspring of those grandparents had not managed to ramify, over fifty years, into every branch of American commerce. In other words, her family tree, though young, was top-heavy, whereas Richard’s was elderly and dying. If he was the classically uptight WASP, she was the exemplary undisciplined Jewess, all erotic pungency and chthonian ravines, forever counteracting his good breeding with outrageous public outbursts along the lines of: “Last night Richard came seven times. I had to stop—I was getting sore—but he could have gone on all night.” Such remarks hardly seemed to faze Richard, who responded to them merely by blowing smoke rings. Like so many sons of Park Avenue, he knew how to keep his cool. Indeed, only once in my presence did he ever show his hand, and that was when Susan, rather indiscreetly, referred to “the days when Carey was always trying to get Ricky into bed,” at which point his eyes widened, his mouth froze, a blush ascended his cheeks like a climbing rose.
In those years I used to make it my habit to ride the subway uptown well after midnight. When I mentioned this to my father on the phone one afternoon, he became so alarmed that he started sending me a monthly “taxi allowance”—which, instead of using for cabs, I stowed away in the bank: why waste money, after all, when reports of subway dangers were so obviously exaggerated? Instead I took bolder risks. Finding myself stuck on the East Side at two o’clock in the morning, I would walk alone across Central Park instead of waiting for a bus, and could not fathom what all the fuss was about: after all, the park was bursting with people, only some of whom were junkies. In retrospect, the nonchalance with which I risked my life regularly, both in the subways and on the streets, rather stuns me, especially given my extreme wariness where sex and drugs were concerned. Drugs especially. Even in the cocaine heatstroke that was Manhattan in those years, I never so much as puffed on a joint, ostensibly because I was too much of a “good boy” to break the law, really because I feared the loss of control, the ecstatic rein-loosening, to which drugs were supposed to lead.
As for sex, the distaste I claimed to feel for the sort of quick encounters with which homosexuality has always been associated was really a cover for my deep attraction to those very leather bars and porn emporia of which in public I voiced such old-maidish disapproval. For the truth was, I worried that if I stepped even once down those corridors of pleasure, I might never again find my way out.
This did not mean, however, that I avoided gay bars. On the contrary, most Friday and Saturday nights I invariably went (by subway, of course) to Boy Bar on St. Mark’s Place, sometimes with Will and, on rarer occasions, alone. For here, as at the Columbia dances, I was almost always certain to run into friends from school, with whom I could fall into easy conversational groupings that would protect me from that fidgety ritual of staring and dancing that is every gay bar’s raison d’être; and yet sometimes, when no one I knew happened to be hanging out at Boy Bar, and I found myself standing alone with my mineral water on the fringes of the dance floor, then my carefully arranged fig leaf of sociability would suddenly fall away, exposing that basest and most unbecoming of motives: libido. Now I was no different from anyone else at the bar. I looked and longed. Sometimes people looked back. Once I even worked up the courage to approach a man with maple-colored hair who had winked at me, only to find that when he moved his manly jaw the voice that emerged from his throat was that of Gale Gordon, Mr. Mooney on The Lucy Show.
“You’re a writer! How fascinating!”
“And you?”
“I’m a window dresser!”
What is it about those two words—“window dresser”—that causes them to connote the very opposite of sex? “Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” I told the window dresser, whose coppery chest had made my mouth water. “I’d better be getting home.”
“But I was hoping you’d come home with me”
Go home with Mr. Mooney! How was it possible? All night, visions of red-haired Lucy, Lucy past her prime and up to no good, would dance wildly in my head. No, I could never go home with Mr. Mooney; I was holding out for love; for Carey. And yet whenever Carey and I were together somehow I could never seem to find the words to clue him in that I was “interested.” Nor did he, in his furious prosecution of the day, give me anything in the way of opportunity. I assumed that he was shy and that to compensate I would simply have to work that much harder. But how? So sexless and sociable was our friendship that if I asked him out to dinner he would assume I meant at Tom’s Diner, or with ten other people. On the other hand, if I made it obvious that I had a crush on him (difficult in the best of circumstances) the result might be rejection—a prospect I did not much relish.
The trouble was, in those years I still had no natural feeling for courtship; no instincts guided me; in the language of the human heart I remained, and would remain for some time, illiterate. As an adolescent it had been easier. Back then, whenever I’d had a “crush” on a girl, I’d simply slipped a letter asking her to “go steady” through the grille of her locker, or deputized a friend (usually another girl) to deliver the message in my stead. Nor had I matured, at twenty-two, beyond such methods, which was why, that Sunday, I called up Susan and invited her for a corned beef sandwich at Barney Greengrass. As she was a passionate eater, and Richard was off with his family in Aspen, she accepted at once. We met, and devoured our sandwiches in a frenzy. Mustard dripped from our chins. Afterward, because there were no men present, we split a slab of chocolate cake.
It was only once the cake had been finished, the crumbs picked from the plate, our lips licked clean, that we started talking. Lighting a cigarette, Susan gazed at me. I had on my sad face. “What’s wrong?” she asked, as I’d hoped she would.
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
“Are you sure?” She leaned intimately across the table. “Because if something is wrong, I hope you know that you can trust me.”
I looked at her assessingly. Her dark eyes were veritable pools of solicitude, her voice unctuous with the longing to advise.
Then I cleared my throat, and said that I had fallen in love with Carey. Her lips convulsed, baring her big front teeth, on one of which a speckle of parsley glinted. “You’re kidding,” she said. “You’ve got the hots for Carey}"
“Have the hots” seemed the wrong phrase to express my idealized (and largely manufactured) passion. Nonetheless I nodded.
Susan clapped her hands together. “But that’s fantastic!” she said. “I can’t believe I never thought of it myself. You and Carey! Perfect!”
“Do you think so?”
“Of course. I can see it now—editor and writer. You’ll take literary Manhattan by storm! Not to mention gay Manhattan.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Confidentially, Richard and I have been hoping something like this would happen, only ... well, it hasn’t been easy for Ricky with ... you know...”
I remained silent. I didn’t know. She told me. It seemed that Carey’s history with Richard had not been an entirely happy one. Oh, things had begun cordially enough, when the boys were roommates and best friends in college. But then, rather out of the blue one evening, Carey had announced that he was in love with Richard—a declaration to which the bewildered Richard had responded first by apologizing, then by reaffirming his essential heterosexuality, then by assuring Carey that this would in no way affect their friendship; all of which had only fueled Carey’s determination to seduce his roommate, whose denials he took as further evidence of suppressed desire.
After that, Carey’s passion had grown unmanageable. At night Richard dared not fall asleep for fear lest he should crawl into his bed and try to kiss him. Susan’s appearance on the scene only made things tenser, and might have led to a full-fledged rupture had she not adopted, quite cleverly, the strategy of taking Carey on as a confidant, and thus deflecting any feelings of antipathy. They became a trio, and for a while even lived together in the apartment on 87th Street, Carey sleeping on the living room couch, until the loud noises of Richard and Susan’s lovemaking drove him to despair and he moved, alone, to the spartan studio he now rented on 110th Street.
“But even with that, he’s always at our house,” Susan said. “You’ve seen how it is. He comes over for supper, or to play a game of Risk. And of course we can’t throw him out, even when we would like a little privacy. I keep saying to Richard, the only solution is for Carey to get a boyfriend, yet he never seems to, he’s always pining after these ridiculous men who won’t give him the time of day.”
“Really?” This was the first I had heard about the ridiculous men who wouldn’t give him the time of day. Still, I was determined to take Susan’s encouragement to heart. “So what should I do?” I asked. “I mean, if he doesn’t know, how do I make him know?”
She pursed her lips. “Well, one possibility,” she said, “is that I could talk to him...”
I didn’t smile—though of course this was exactly what I was hoping for. “Do you think that would be a good idea?”
“Sure—if I’m subtle, which I will be. I’ll feel him out first so that you can feel him up later.” She giggled.
“Would you do that for me, Susan?”
“For both of you, dearie.”
The bill had arrived. “I’ll pay it,” I said.
She did not object.
The next morning I had just returned from the Korean grocery on the comer when Faye, who was smoking in the kitchen, told me that Richard had phoned. This surprised me: it was Susan, or Carey himself, from whom I was expecting to hear. Nonetheless I called back eagerly. What Richard told me was that earlier in the morning, examining his Week-at-a-Glance, he had discovered that today was his and Susan’s “half anniversary.” By way of celebration, he and Carey were organizing a spontaneous party, inviting some friends to have dinner with them that evening at Susan’s favorite Chinese restaurant. Yet this was not all: to mark the event, each of us was to surprise her with a half present—he, for example, was going to give her a set of half-moon pearl earrings, while Carey was giving her the first half of a two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey. Might I bring something equally “half-baked”? he asked, his voice nasally genteel, to which I responded that even if it meant treading the avenues of Manhattan to its very edges, I would find the perfect thing.
After I hung up Faye wandered by my door. “And what are you up to this morning?” she asked wistfully. “Off to work?”
“No, it’s my day off.”
“Oh, of course. Stupid of me to forget.” She sneezed delicately. “Imagine that, a young man, a day off, all of Manhattan to enjoy. So what’s it going to be? A movie? The Met? A stroll in the park?”
“Actually, I have to go shopping for an anniversary present—a half-anniversary present,” I said, and explained the situation.
“But isn’t that charming,” Faye said, “doing that for the girl he loves.”
In a burst of sudden generosity I invited her to come with me on my shopping trip. The invitation appeared both to stun and delight her; after all, not once since her arrival had Will or I (her son need not even be mentioned) deigned to include her in any of our extra-apartmental activities. Cheeks flushed, for the first time in weeks, with pleasure, Faye hurried to get dressed. We rode the subway together to Macy’s. “Now, let’s see,” she said as we headed through the revolving door, her voice tremulous at the prospect of actually being able to help, “a half present ... let’s concentrate ... let’s give it all our attention ... or half our attention!”
In fact my own attention kept wandering to other items, such as a pair of cufflinks in the form of plume pens, or a putty-colored Ralph Lauren shirt that I thought might beautifully complement Carey’s eyes. “How about a half-slip?” Faye suggested. “Or a half-tester? What is a half-tester? Or half a gallon of half-and-half?”
In the end we settled on half a pound of Godiva chocolates and a tape of the soundtrack to Half a Sixpence: nothing so good as Carey’s gift, but true to the theme. Then we went back home; I showered and shaved. “What are you going to wear?” asked Faye, who was now sitting in the kitchen, reading a novel the cover of which depicted a child’s ball bouncing into a wading pool filled with blood.
“I’m not sure yet.”
She put her book down. “Let me help you! I love helping people pick out clothes. You know I’ve always regretted that I never had a daughter.”
We stepped into my room. “Uh-uh, nope, nope,” Faye muttered, pushing aside the hangers in my closet. “Too conservative.”
“What about this one?”
“Ugh! Anyway, there’s a stain on the lapel. What you need is something with oomph, something ... Wait a minute, what’s this?” And she pulled out a rather outrageous shirt I had bought the month before and still not worn, on which climbing roses made their way up a trellis of pale blue stripes.
“Do you like it?”
“Oh, yes. It’s so—new. Now try it on. Black pants, if you’ve got them.”
Crossing her arms, she stared at me. For a few seconds I stood helplessly before her, until she got the hint, and burst into a fit of laughter. “Oh, I see,” she said, clapping her hands over her mouth. “Dennis doesn’t like to undress in front of me either. Well, don’t worry, I’ll skedaddle.” And she shut the bedroom door behind her. Taking off my bathrobe, I put on clean underwear and socks, the flowered shirt, a pair of black jeans, black socks, and Doc Martens, then strode into the living room, where Faye was watching the news. Muting the volume, she stood. “Now let me see,” she said. “Almost perfect ... the only thing you need ... ah, I know.” And she rummaged in her purse.
“Here,” she said, pulling out a little vial of perfume. “It’s the new Calvin Klein.”
“But I never wear—”
“Ssh. Bend your neck.”
I did. Standing on tiptoe, she spritzed me. The cologne both burned and chilled.
“Now you
’re ready,” Faye said, patting me on the arm. “Go and have fun.”
Picking up my bag of half presents, I headed out the door. Appropriately, I was running half an hour ahead of schedule. Because no one else had arrived at the Chinese restaurant, I had to wait alone at the big table with its pots of soy sauce and hot pepper sauce, studying the menu, until Carey walked in. (He too was prone to be early.) “Hi,” he said, taking the seat across from mine.
“Hi, Carey.” I put the menu down.
“Wow, that’s quite a shirt you’re wearing.”
“Thanks.” I wasn’t certain I’d been complimented. As for him, to judge from his Oxford shirt, he’d come straight from work.
Somewhat irritably he lit a cigarette. “Have a good day?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Marge on the rampage?”
“Stanley on the rampage. He’s threatening to quit because she won’t let him buy a six-hundred-page poem by a taxidermist.”
Richard and Susan now entered the restaurant, both out of breath. Standing, Carey kissed each of them on the cheek, and was about to reclaim his place across the table from me when Susan said, “No, don’t sit there, sit here, next to Martin.”
Uneasily, he picked up his jacket and moved. She winked at me.
“That shirt’s so—vivid,” Richard said.
“Do you like it?”
“It reminds me of my parents’ bedroom curtains,” said Susan. “Gosh, I’m hungry Who else is coming?”
“Amos and Ingo.”
“They’re late.”
Soon enough, however, Amos and Ingo (pace Forster, they need not be described) arrived, and Susan was presented with her gifts. “All you have to guess,” Richard said, “is what they have in common.”
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