It wasn’t that bad. It had blinking lightbulbs outside surrounding the name. It was right on Forty-second Street, in among all those sleazy movie houses with all the action in the balconies. (How does one know this stuff so fast? I don’t know. But one does, like osmosis.)
Tad’s looked like a bar, but they did have a steak and a large baked potato and salad for $3.98. Can’t beat that. In the few weeks we’d been working, Alfred and I usually had Salisbury steak at the cafeteria. Sometimes we went to a White Castle for those little hamburgers, but usually that was even beneath us, and we didn’t go there very often. Only sometimes on a Saturday, between shows, when we did two shows.
“I’m choreographing a modern-dance piece for the Ninety-second Street Y and I thought maybe I could get you guys to be in it,” Siegfried said after we got our steaks out of the way. We had all decided to spend another thirty-five cents on apple pie à la mode. Alfred actually wanted rice pudding, but that wasn’t in the Tad’s repertoire. Or his favorite, prune pockets. Tad’s wasn’t kosher.
“When would we rehearse?” I wanted to know.
“Sundays. Joy said she’d work in it. There’d just be the four of us. It’s a Young Choreographers Night in December. I figure we can get it together in about eight rehearsals. Long ones. I know exactly what I want to do. I’m just going to do it to the sound of falling rain.”
“Do you have the sound of falling rain recorded?” Alfred inquired politely. I think his mother must have been reading Virginia Woolf when she was pregnant with him. He always looked and talked like a Sitwell at a tea party somewhere. “Perhaps you should use Chopin. You know, many people think George Sand fucked Chopin to death. He weighed hardly a hundred pounds, even in good health.” We didn’t know that. Alfred went on, “Do you ever have the impression that life is something like climbing a mountain in the fog? You know, one of those days when the sun is shining through the fog so it’s all bright and white and you can see where you’re going right around you, but no further? Something like a Caspar David Friedrich painting.” Siegfried and I looked at each other. Neither of us had ever heard of Caspar David Friedrich. I admired Alfred for striking out so boldly without considering whether Siegfried would be interested in his sudden riff on life.
Siegfried was a real professional. How old was he? Twenty-two? Twenty-four? Older. Very glamorous, very sure of himself, and very sexy. He was all that. Blonds aren’t usually very sexy, but he was sort of a bigger, stronger Erik Bruhn who looked like he might really like to fuck. That’s not so common among Scandinavians, you know.
“You’re climbing with other people and you just assume they know where they’re going,” Alfred continued. “But maybe they don’t. Maybe you’re walking along the edge of a precipice. Maybe they’ll disappear into the fog and leave you alone.”
“That’s a good idea for my piece,” Siegfried said. “I think that’s what I’ll do. By the end I’ll be all alone. My idea is that Joy and I will be lovers and you two will be aspects of myself.”
Which aspects, was what I wanted to know.
“Harry will sort of be my happy, eager, childlike side. And you will be my doubting, depressed side,” he said to Alfred.
Alfred said, “I love my role already. Did I get the depressed side because I’m brunet? And Harry got the happy side because he’s blond?”
“No,” Siegfried said. “Because you’re taller. Besides, how could Harry play the depressed person?”
“Oh, you should see him when he can’t get his pirouettes to the left,” Alfred said. “He can be suicidal.”
“You guys are fun,” Siegfried said. “Let’s get out of here.” I wondered what was so fun about me. I hadn’t said ten words all evening. “Where do you go?” Siegfried wanted to know.
“Alfred goes downtown on the Broadway local. I take the Seventh Avenue down to Eighteenth Street,” I said.
“Oh, good, I’ll go along with you.” Underground, Alfred scuttled off towards his platform and Siegfried and I walked over to the Seventh Avenue local track.
Nothing brings back my past like the subway stations in New York. High-rises come and go, but the subway is as unchangeable as the Pyramids. That night on the Seventh Avenue local platform must have been exactly like the first night the station opened. Maybe not the first night, but about a week later. In the 1920s? Gloomy lights, gum ground into the cement platform, the tile on the walls across the tracks already greasy, and that smell of hot metal in the air. It was like that the night Siegfried and I stood there, two blonds, about the same height. Brothers, maybe. Dance bags slung over our shoulders. “We’re just going to wear practice clothes,” Siegfried was saying about his dance. “Maybe street clothes. Maybe just like the clothes we’re wearing. No set. This new guy, Tom Skelton, said he’d do the lighting for me free.”
If I were to take the subway this very evening and get off at Forty-second Street, it would be exactly the same as it was that night. Siegfried may be dying at St. Vincent’s. Me with my doctor’s bag instead of a dance bag. But there would be the same gray light, gray smell, and battered gray cement on the station platform. Only the black man playing the drum made out of a big oilcan would be different.
Siegfried got off with me at the Eighteenth Street station. “Do you live around here?” I asked him. “No, actually I live in Queens, but I thought I’d walk you home. Maybe come up and talk for a little while.” Home run, Siegfried. Your plans for your moderndance piece got me completely off guard. I was very excited. Was I going to be in bed with that great Scandinavian body yet tonight? Feeling those smooth chest muscles? Running my hands down over that flat, flat stomach? Maybe being kissed with those curved lips, just like a statue’s?
Siegfried didn’t like to kiss, it turned out.
Siegfried walked into my cold-water flat, looked around, and said, “I think I’ll stay overnight. You don’t mind, do you? It’s a long way out to Queens. You’ve got two beds.” I guess I mumbled something. Siegfried didn’t want to have a cup of coffee. He asked for a glass of water. And started undressing in the little bedroom where Belle-Mère used to sleep. I went into the kitchen and brushed my teeth and when I came back Siegfried was in the double bed. He didn’t have anything on. I could see his underpants on the chair–Jockey shorts. I undressed, trying to be nonchalant. As nonchalant as you can be with a hard-on.
Siegfried didn’t say anything. He was just lying there with his eyes closed and a smile on his face. He had that kind of Attic smile–turned up a little bit on the corners, like the smile you see on the faces of those early Greek statues. They’re amused, but you don’t know what about. Probably at how easy I was. At least he wasn’t looking at my hard-on.
As soon as I got into bed, wearing pajamas, Siegfried opened his eyes, reached over and turned out the light, and reached over for me. “Let’s get you out of those things,” he said, unbuttoning my pajamas. When he felt my hard-on, he said, “We’ll have to do something about that.” I felt for his penis. It was up and felt very big, circumcised. That was good. (I’ve never liked uncircumcised penises. Like eating endive.) “Why don’t you poge me and then I’ll poge you,” he said once he got me undressed. I had just lain there, pulling my feet up when he pulled my pajama pants off.
I didn’t say anything, but just pulled him on top of me. He fitted his penis between my legs. “Not romantic enough for you, huh?” he said. It felt good. Large. He pressed into me. I put my arms around his neck and kissed him. I felt like kissing him. His mouth was sort of dry and he didn’t open his lips. He pressed into me again and I came.
“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m just overexcited at being in bed with you.”
“It’s okay–it’s kind of flattering. Got any cards?” I did, actually. Belle-Mère and Levoy and I used to play hearts a lot. I reached over and turned on the lights and got out of bed to get them.
“Nice ass,” Siegfried said.
“Same to you.”
We sat on the bed with nothing on and Si
egfried taught me how to play gin rummy. I never had before. “It’s getting late and we have to rehearse La Traviata tomorrow,” I said. “What’s to rehearse?” he said. “And we’re young. We’ll be fine if we don’t get any sleep at all.”
Which is pretty much what happened. I was laying my cards out in front of Siegfried, sitting cross-legged on the bed, and I noticed he had a half-hard-on. So I laid the cards right down in his crotch and leaned over and slipped my mouth over it, in among all the cards. “Oh, hey,” he said, and leaned over backwards onto the bed, his winkie just popping right up among the cards. Did you ever notice how the penis fits so exactly right into the mouth? Perhaps you haven’t.
Before we got done, those cards had pretty well had it. (I tried to iron some of them out a few days later, but they were pretty crushed up.) He finally came between my legs. I was afraid of that big engine of his. Really big. Is that a Scandinavian thing? I never heard that it was. I came at the same time he did. Just from him flailing around on top of me. It can happen. “Hold me very tight,” I said in his ear and he did. He did, and then we slept for a while, all sticky. Then we got up and took a bath together in that funny tub in the kitchen with the lift-up lids. I don’t know what got into me, but I pushed him down on the daybed when we were going back towards the bedroom and gave him a blow job. I guess I felt like I couldn’t get through the whole next day without having sex again. One more time just to hold me for a while. He enjoyed it a lot and kept running his hands through my hair.
“Nice hair,” he said in a dreamy kind of way.
“Mmmmm … bummm … mmmmm,” I said.
And then he came all over the place. Sexually he was kind of a lavish guy in every way.
On the subway back to the opera house that morning, he told me that he lived in Queens with someone who was a clerk at Bloomingdale’s. They had been lovers last year. Last year was Siegfried’s first year at the opera. He was from Minneapolis and had been trained by the Esterhazys there. He said his roommate wasn’t his lover anymore. “Oh, well, once in a while,” he said.
“Do you want to move in with me?” I said. I had fallen in love with Siegfried for the moment. You know how it is. Somebody good-looking pops it to you and you think this is it for life. Many a marriage has gotten off the ground just that way, I’m sure.
“Oh, no. I’m fine where I am. But we’ll have lots of fun this winter, I promise you.” He reached over and patted my knee. When we walked up the subway stairs, he fell behind me and reached up and grabbed my crotch from behind between my legs and gave me a reassuring squeeze. That was Illy Ilquist’s gesture of affection.
I was glad it all happened with Illy so soon after my mother left. I had someone to be close to, even if it was Illy’s rather cool idea of closeness.
Robby gave us quite a look as we came into the dressing room. I just ignored him. The stage manager came in and said, “Callas wants two boys to escort her in for the first party scene in La Traviata. She said she wanted the two blonds. I guess she meant you guys–Illy and the new kid. What’s your name?”
“Harry,” I said. “The new Harry.”
And that’s what they called me that season: “the new Harry.” Thank God they didn’t call the other one “the old Harry.” He was blond, too, and I’m sure would have worked with Illy if I hadn’t been on the scene. But he was always nice to me.
Robby wasn’t. As we headed out to go down to the stage, he said, “Oh, those tall, bad-tempered blonds. They always get everything their way, and we short brunets just get our brains fucked out.”
“You should be so lucky,” Tony said.
It’s curious, Tony showed up in my office a year or so ago. While we were at the opera, he had decided he wanted to be called Antonio, and for some reason people actually did. He recognized me. “You used to dance at the opera, didn’t you? Just for two seasons, as I remember. I’m still there in the new house. I’m old as hell. Which doesn’t seem to matter. I must have had a yard of cock in me in the last two weeks. I’ve got this really shitty cold.”
He was rather admiring of the fact that I had become a doctor. “You shouldn’t have quit dancing, though. You were good. Didn’t Balanchine want you at the New York City Ballet? I seem to remember that.”
He was right. They did want me, sort of. At least they were interested. But I didn’t want them.
He looked around my examining room. “Do you ever fuck anybody here in the office?” he said. “Get them right up on that examining table and sock it to them?”
“I don’t, but what a good idea,” I said. I didn’t say anymore, in case he thought I was coming on to him. We said good-bye and I never saw him again. I guess he got over his cold. Of course, it could have been early symptoms of AIDS. I hope not. I never go to the opera, so I’ve no idea if he’s still in the company or not.
Norma and Other Operas
Just come right over here, Mary, and hit this gong,” Dino Yannopoulos said. He was talking to Maria Callas. They were both Greek, and I guess he must have known her in her previous life as Mary Somebody from Brooklyn. Maria didn’t cotton very much to being called Mary. She was very fine now and was getting what the dancers called “high tits” from having to hit a gong in the third act of Norma.
“I can’t do this with all these people watching me,” she said imperiously. She was imperious in her new nonfat incarnation. Very thin and tall, with a head like one of those figures on the early Greek vases. All nose and eyes. “There will be just as many people on the stage when you do this next Thursday,” Dino said.
She repeated herself. “I can’t do this with all these people watching me,” she said again. Have you ever noticed that stars do not enter into dialogues with people? What you have to say is not important. They just repeat themselves until they get their own way.
“Okay, everybody, back into the wings,” Dino said. “You’re not on stage yet in this scene.” There were about one hundred of us on the stage with the chorus, the dancers, the extras, and the rest of the cast. Fedora Barbieri was already in the wings. She was shorter, squatter, and had a very reliable voice. She knew what she had to put up with and what she didn’t, as far as Callas was concerned.
We all went into the wings. We weren’t really in costume, but some people were wearing Druid helmets with horns on them. Norma takes place in France in the time of the Druids. How’s that for an unlikely plot location? Was Mario del Monaco the Roman centurion? I think so. He was very handsome, with a large, hovering prison-matron of a wife.
“I can’t do this with all these people watching me,” we heard Miss Callas repeat. There was a very long silence. There wasn’t any real battle of the wills. She was the one with the big mallet in her hands. She was the one that had to hit the gong.
“All right, everybody. Go into the halls,” the director called out. There were narrow halls leading off on each side of the stage. We obediently packed our bodies into the halls, trying to avoid getting our eyes gouged out by the horned helmets. On the other side of the closed door we heard some feeble sounds of the gong. “Norma is calling the Druids to her aid,” Alfred said in my ear.
“That’s us, I think,” I said.
“Well, let’s go aid her,” he said as the door was flung open, and we all poured back onto the stage.
As the rehearsal ended and we left the stage, we saw a woman in a pink suit with a strange kind of pink stovepipe hat tilted on her head and an immobile, masklike face standing on the step that led to the star’s dressing rooms. “That’s Marlene Dietrich,” Alfred said. He seemed to always be hovering somewhere near my ear. The figure looked more like a life-size Marlene Dietrich doll.
“Are you sure?” I asked him.
“It’s the hat,” he said. “Only Marlene would wear a hat like that. Would dare to wear a hat like that.”
Maria Callas greeted her. They kissed on both cheeks and disappeared towards her dressing room.
“I guess they’re going to have lunch,” I said.
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br /> “I don’t think they’re going to bump pussies,” Siegfried said into my other ear. “I never heard that about Maria.”
As we went up to the dressing room, he told me that when Marlene was first in Hollywood she was having affairs with Gary Cooper and Maurice Chevalier at the same time, which neither of them objected to. But when she added Mercedes de Acosta, a Hollywood personality, to the mix, they drew the line. So she told both of them they could go fly a kite and hung out with Mercedes. That improved her standing with me.
That evening Siegfried said, “When I first came to New York, I was walking down Sixth Avenue at night and I looked across the street and there was Marlene Dietrich and Noël Coward, just walking along. He was wearing white tie and tails, she was wearing a long white gown and white fox. I thought, This is it. This is why I’m here. A town where Dietrich and Coward walk down the street and nobody even turns around to look.”
“Oh, Illy, I love you so much,” I said.
“Well, I want to thank you,” he said.
He was lying on his back with his legs spread around my waist. I was kneeling between them, masturbating him. He had his arms behind his head and was good-humoredly regarding the wonder of his own cock. It took two hands.
It turned out that Illy really liked a long massage session finishing with me masturbating him. Sort of worshiping at the shrine of his penis. It was sort of worth worshiping.
He loved bodies. He said to me once, when my legs were on either side of his head, “I could never get used to men who don’t have nice feet.”
Sometimes when Siegfried and I were having our sex sessions he would want to have me slide my penis into him as I knelt between his legs. “Don’t move,” he would order. He certainly enjoyed his own orgasms, running his hands over his body and pressing down around the base of his penis. Once a friend called while we were in the middle of one of our sessions and I talked and then sucked his cock while I listened to my friend rattle on. This made Illy uneasy that the person on the other end of the line would hear slurping. “He wouldn’t know it was you,” I told him when I hung up.
The Sex Squad Page 7