Roberto nodded toward the balcony that ran all around the house, where a cook was prodding swordfish sputtering on a grill. “I need some air,” he said. I said I would join him once I used the facilities.
The bathroom, like the rest of the house, was redolent of mildew and none too clean. A layer of dust the color of bone meal coated everything, from the lemon-shaped soaps in a canister on the sink to the Serenity Prayer hung eye-level back of the toilet tank. Was that a joke? I wondered, then wondered again. Ian was not widely thought of as alcoholic, but had certainly been drinking rigorously this year.
Ian’s bathroom reading, in a brass bucket, was not the biographies of Douglas MacArthur and the Duke of Wellington I’d expected, but Boswell’s history of Christianity and homosexuality, with the mosaic of a hare on its cover. After washing my hands, I wandered farther down the quiet corridor to peer into Ian’s bedroom, to see whether he still used Fulton’s circular bed and notorious black satin sheets.
Yes, the bed was still there, unmade, but the sheets were wholesome white cotton. The floor was littered with male detritus: barbells and bodybuilding magazines of men whose chests were so layered with muscle they looked segmented, like the undersides of beetles. On the walls were red abstract canvasses, smears like lab slides.
Then I realized that I was not alone. Something was moving on the balcony outside the bedroom, beyond the gauzy oatmeal-colored curtains, beyond the open sliding door—something small. My first reaction was fear, fear in the wake of Arthur’s incident and the arrival of Hollings Fair’s Christian Soldiers. But then embarrassment superseded this fear, as though I’d been caught foraging through someone’s medicine cabinet.
Then I realized the figure on the balcony was Edward Babineaux. He was watching people trekking across the breakwater, crossing the long, twisting expanse of granite, coming from the nude section of Herring Cove.
“Wishing you were at the beach?” I said to him. I felt I had to alert him that I was there, although I sensed he’d seen me all along.
“Oh, no.” Edward was as devoid of humor as before. “I’m here. I live in the here and now.”
Being homeless, I imagine, makes that a sensible strategy.
“I’m representing Arthur,” Edward said, “at Ian’s party.”
“In Ian’s bedroom.”
“With you.” His smile was sweet as a geisha’s.
“I hate to be blunt, but I’m worried sick about Arthur. All of his old friends are worried sick. I’d like to hear from him in person to be sure he’s okay.”
“Don’t you trust me?” Edward was obviously enjoying forcing me to be polite and hypocritical.
“Of course I trust you,” I lied.
Edward reported that Arthur wasn’t good. I thought he might cast himself in the role of his keeper’s savior, providing gourmet cooking and comforts of the flesh, but he didn’t. He said Arthur’s psychiatrist had phoned the local pharmacy so Arthur had access to sedatives to dull his nerves. “He has night terrors,” Edward said. “He wakes up screaming. Because of the calls.”
“What calls? From the media?”
He shook his buzz-cut head. “They’ve called, but I took care of them. These other calls come in the early morning. They don’t say anything. I pick up the phone and there’s just…silence.”
No wonder Arthur was shunning the telephone. “Have you told the police?”
Edward had come in off the balcony. He was investigating the top of Ian’s bureau, which was as well-stocked as his bar, except that these bottles, of course, contained colognes, in silver flasks and sapphire-blue cubes, all with knobby stoppers you could really grip.
“We’ve told the police and they’ve tried to trace the calls. We’ve had one call since they put the tap on the line. It was made from a public telephone in Hyannis. They hung up immediately.”
“I keep thinking about these fundamentalists, these Christian Soldiers.”
Edward nodded.
“I keep wondering—did they do this to Arthur personally, or as a warning to the entire community? Targeting a prominent gay man.”
Dreamily, like a child at play in his mother’s bedroom, Edward kept unscrewing bottles of cologne, sniffing each one.
“You must really love cologne.” I sat down on the circular bed.
“Not really. They’re just chemicals. And I have allergies like you wouldn’t believe.”
“What were you doing,” I said, “before you met Arthur?”
“I was at cooking school.”
That explained the superb bouillabaisse. “Were you expelled for burning a soufflé?”
He didn’t laugh. He advanced toward me with the dancer’s grace he’d demonstrated at Arthur’s party, snuffing the candles and raising the window shades and his host’s spirits. He paused to stroke my earlobe, a quick erotic gesture with the tip of his finger. “Thank you for asking about us.” Then he kissed my cheek and swiftly exited the room, neglecting to screw the stoppers back on Ian’s colognes.
I found Roberto wandering around the living room, holding two plates of grilled swordfish. “It’s getting cold,” he said, referring it seemed to both the meal and his mood. “What took you so long? Don’t tell me there’s a back room.”
“Edward was there.”
“I saw him. He just left.”
“Having a good time?” Ian now asked. Guilty about prowling in his bedroom, I compensated by being overly enthusiastic, saying, “I’ve always loved this house. Everything is just great!”
“Do you love it enough to buy it? It’s costing me a fucking fortune. It’s this damn erosion problem. The hill this house is built on is becoming destabilized. The whole house is threatening to break apart. It’s this damn sand. I mean, I left San Francisco to avoid this situation. I didn’t want to wake up with my house on top of me!”
Barton Daggett, all but bursting from his seersucker suit, could not resist joining us to bemoan his own real estate woes, so Ian was off to check on dessert. “First my woods become infested with ticks, those Lyme disease ticks, from the gee-dee deer. Deer, I call them rats with antlers. Then these people move in that make the deer seem terrific—these imbeciles who shoot things in the woods, at all hours.”
“Perhaps they’re shooting the deer that carry the ticks,” Roberto said.
This logic seemed to irritate Barton, who changed the subject, asking Roberto, “Are you a St. Harold’s graduate?”
Ian saved Roberto from responding by bellowing, “Attention, attention, gentlemen! May I have a moment of silence, please?”
The laughter and conversation subsided, then Ian vanished into the kitchen to return with our dessert on a silver tray: an ice cream cake in the shape of the St. Harold’s crest. It was a warm evening and the air-conditioning was off—what with the doors flung open to the balcony—so the cake was sweating like a finalist finishing the Boston Marathon. Already, pieces of the insignia, the icing lions and some ivy, were threatening to drop away. Alone, in a boozy tenor, Ian sang the school hymn, laughing on the verse, “And eternal, like the hills, St. Harold’s…lives.”
Everyone cheered.
“Where on earth did you procure this cake?” Barton Daggett asked Ian.
“‘Procure’ is certainly the right word,” Ian said. The cake had come from an adults-only bakery in Hyannis, one that specialized in edible smut, in rendering breasts and genitalia in frosting. “I’m told the baker is a failed gynecologist.”
Someone had the bad taste to ask, “Who was St. Harold? He wasn’t the author of any gospels.”
“He’s the patron saint of the bankrupt,” Ian said. Then, he called out, “Let us raise our glasses…We toast the men of classes past. For at St. Harold’s, there is no future.”
Then we drank and Ian cut the cake with a dull-bladed sword from Barton’s collection.
Chapter Five
Arthur called that evening, while I was still at Ian’s St. Harold’s party. Had Edward engineered that contact? Left the p
arty early to tell Arthur to call me when Edward knew only my answering machine was home? “Mark, don’t be worried,” Arthur’s voice said. “Edward is taking wonderful care of me, especially of my stomach. I’m gorging myself. He’s feeding me riotous amounts of calories. I’m the size of a walrus. Take care.”
That, at least, was sound advice. To “take care” that dangerous summer…
So it wasn’t Arthur but Commercial Street that finally introduced me to Roger Morton. Both of us were peering into the office Hollings Fair and his Christian Soldiers were renting across from Spiritus Pizza. The office was empty except for an orange bead curtain from the building’s former life as a Chinese restaurant. Cornering Roger, I used Arthur’s name as a reference to ask for a run at Quahog. Roger had one opening next Saturday at eight, replacing a female impersonator whose mono was back.
Performers in Provincetown get saddled with generating their own audiences, so Sammy, one of our actors, a graphic designer who’d been fired by most of the high-tech firms along Route 128, had cobbled together some flyers from clip art and a photo of the troupe and shipped them to us by overnight mail. Unfortunately, he’d bungled the date of our gig, so Roberto and I had to correct each flyer by hand, using pink felt pens, then we thumb-tacked them to anything upright: bulletin boards, telephone poles, trees, the salt-eaten stalls in the men’s room at Herring Cove. We distributed them from towel to towel at the beach and to people filing out from tea dance. We left piles of them in guest house halls, by the complimentary toothpicks and mints.
The five other members of the troupe carpooled down the afternoon before the show, and, over nachos and too much beer, we planned our performance: the skit types, the casts, and so on. We were giddy with confidence and terror, certain we would bomb and equally sure we’d be The Next Big Thing. “I don’t have butterflies in my stomach, I have California condors,” Roberto said.
We spent the hour before curtain time “barking” in front of Quahog, pestering Commercial Street’s tourists to buy tickets. I’ve seldom depended upon the kindness of strangers, so I found barking embarrassing, a first cousin to outright panhandling. I kept pretty quiet and offered my flyers to people too timid to refuse them.
An older man in a flasher’s raincoat the color of hummus thanked me for a flyer and asked, “Is your show men in dresses?” Roberto answered that we couldn’t afford costumes, so he said he’d try to make it. “It’s always good to broaden our audience,” Roberto reasoned.
Twenty minutes before eight, a group of five men in camouflage that mimicked sycamore bark approached us—Christian Soldiers, for sure. My stomach felt like one of those balloons street vendors torture into animal shapes to sell to children.
“Does your comedy make fun of God?” one of them asked.
“Buy a ticket and find out,” Roberto said.
“We’re after laughs,” I said, “not changing theology.”
“Have you heard of Hollings Fair?” the Soldier asked.
“I heard him speak once, at town hall,” I said.
Luckily, that satisfied him. “God loves you,” he said, making it sound like a threat. Then they dispersed.
At ten minutes to eight, we stopped barking and went inside Quahog. There were just three people in the audience. The restaurant was decorated with the sort of kitsch statuettes, plaster sea captains, fish sporting chefs’ hats, mermaids rising from painted waves, that often mean the menu is surf ‘n’ turf specials and baked stuffed lobster with a bad lobster-to-breadcrumb ratio.
Quahog’s stage was miniscule, no bigger than the smallest traffic island, and without microphones. Our backstage space was smaller still, a tiny hallway truncated by a flight of stairs to a recently flooded basement. Was this where so many Big Names had gotten their start, amid these plywood walls and concrete steps the color of earwigs? This was Our Big Break, but everything smelled of wet carpeting and a bad night.
And all of us knew this. We avoided eye contact with each other; each person was “preparing” for the show in his own way. Justin was doing his transcendental meditation and twitching a lot. Paul was blowing bubbles from a chartreuse mass of watermelon-flavored gum; Sammy was tinkering with his newly pierced eyebrow; and Brian and Andy looked as though our nachos and beer dinner had declared war on their stomachs.
Roberto was confident, cracking his knuckles and trying out voices. “My Katharine Hepburn sounds just like my Rose Kennedy,” he was complaining.
Andy told Roberto to keep it down, people in the audience might hear him. “What people?” Roberto laughed. He jerked aside the ancient curtain, so soft it seemed more dust than velvet. We counted eleven—eleven people huddled at the mock-colonial tables, in the red glow from hobnail glass lamps.
Andy turned on me. “You said you and Roberto have been leafletting. Then why is the house so awful?”
“Cool it, there’ll be more,” Roberto said, in a Bugs Bunny voice Andy didn’t appreciate.
We had an unwritten rule: when the cast outnumbers the audience, the show must not go on. This wasn’t the case tonight, but, unlike Roberto and me, Andy and the others had driven many miles for such a pathetic house.
Roberto peered back into the audience. “Swell, one guy is leaving.”
“I hope he’s just hitting the men’s room,” I said.
Justin was blinking out of his TM. Paul spit his bubblegum into his hand then stuck it on the wall. Everyone else was trying to act enthused. “Have an awesome night, everybody,” Brian sighed. “It’s eight-fifteen,” Andy said. “If we’re going on, we’ve got to go on now!”
I parted the curtain and counted ten heads, all looking uneasy, almost guilty, as though they’d done something wrong, chosen the wrong show, for instance.
Then, far back in the audience, someone shouted my name: “Mark, YES!” It was Ian, wobbling between two men from the St. Harold’s party. They were emerging from the street with at least five more customers in tow.
“Hey!” I answered Ian, then ducked backstage.
At least they’d bought tickets, but performing in front of friends always spooked me; I felt the stakes were higher, meeting their expectations. Then again, was Ian really my friend? In spite of the childhood rescue, I knew that was debatable.
“Sixteen people,” I reported to Andy. “A guy I know just brought five more bodies.”
“It’s eight-twenty-five let’s go!” Roberto said. So I led the troupe into the spotlight, into the glare. Some polite applause broke out and someone, it might’ve been Ian, bellowed, “Break a leg!” in a beery voice. With the light in our faces, the audience was little more than a blur. My nerves were on overdrive; rivulets of sweat were coursing down my spine, but my mouth felt as dry as though it contained all of the deserts of Arizona, complete with cactus, tarantulas, and Gila monsters. “Hello!” I rasped. “Thanks for coming.”
“Not in my mouth!” some imbecile yelled.
Then I began our introduction, explaining improv required audience collaboration, that skits had rules, like games of baseball, but that every skit was spontaneous as a sneeze and fuelled by their suggestions. “So, when we ask for your input before each skit, or clap to stop the action and get your advice, please be outrageous…”
“What about God?” somebody asked, and my body went on alert, sure Christian Soldiers were in our audience. I caught sight of the man in the flasher’s raincoat, the man who’d asked if we were a drag show; he was stationed at a table down front covered with pamphlets with angels on their covers.
“Is God in your script? In the script of your life?”
“Well, I prayed for a bigger audience,” Roberto admitted.
Two lesbians laughed.
“Anyway,” I said, “your suggestions, divine or otherwise, are most welcome.” Since I was “calling,” directing, the first skit, I asked for a location where the action should take place.
“Mars,” someone in the audience yelled.
“A gay beach,” someone else said.
I took the gay beach on Mars as our setting. The skit, “A Meeting,” was governed by the principle that the actors involved are two gay men, strangers instinctively attracted to each other. We cast our strongest performers, Andy and Roberto, in this skit—and they came through with some good lines, about getting “an earthburn” and being “into tentacles,” then ended with a parody song, “Red Scales in a Sunspot.”
The applause was strong, but when we assembled backstage, Roberto kept worrying his energy was low, jealous, actually, that he wasn’t being singled out as the star.
“At least the holy roller is quiet,” Brian said.
“Well, he’s eating,” Andy said. “He’s preoccupied with his giant order of onion rings.”
Our mood soared as the next two skits went beautifully. Roger Morton appeared at the bar, mixing someone a cocktail requiring grenadine and a tiny paper parasol. Tristan, the bouncer, was now manning the door. It was my turn to act in a skit, “Coming Out,” which involved taking an audience member’s true coming out story and embellishing it with bizarre twists.
Andy, calling the skit, asked, “Who has a coming-out story he’d like to share?” The lesbian couple gave him a stare that all but sandblasted him, so he added, “Or she’d like to share.”
You’d think he’d asked for a moment of silence. Sometimes it was difficult to get people to volunteer a milestone for comic fodder, but we were always gentle with our humor for this skit. “Don’t be shy!” I encouraged the audience. “Tell us a friend’s coming out story.”
The man in the raincoat, the man with the pamphlets, was waving his hand, the only person in the audience to respond, so Andy was forced to acknowledge him. “Yes…sir, do you have a coming-out story?”
“I’m talking about the greatest story ever told,” he answered, then, silently, he rose and began distributing his pamphlets, table by table, around the room. Judging by his walk, he was either drunk or sick. I hadn’t seen him at town hall; he could’ve been a Christian Soldier or just a lone crank.
The Fisher Boy Page 4