The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  Illy said nothing. I had a feeling he would be very pleased to see me leave, only because the whole thing was so embarrassing.

  “I have to,” I said.

  “We could keep you here by force,” Rex said.

  “But you don’t want to,” I told him.

  “No, you’ve already ruined our vacation.”

  I said in a very loud voice that surprised even me, and certainly the people standing in line behind me, tickets in hand, “Goddammit, do you think I care! It wasn’t your vacation in the first place. It was mine. I paid for it!”

  Illy looked at Rex. Rex didn’t flinch. He just raised his eyebrows in surprise, as though he had suddenly encountered an irrational person who was being insulting to poised and faultless him.

  I said, “You’ve been inside hundreds of people but you don’t know anyone.”

  Rex turned and walked away; Illy followed him. He didn’t look at me. Illy hated any kind of emotional display, and most especially in public.

  I went aboard the plane. I cried a lot during the flight. The fat man next to me wasn’t nonplussed. He just pretended it wasn’t happening. The stewardesses were very sympathetic. I’m sure they’ve seen a lot of crying aboard planes. They asked if I wanted lunch, and I nodded yes. I kept right on crying into my pasta with tomato sauce and soggy broccoli.

  From that point on, I guess you could say I went back to Michigan, went to school, and went straight. Certainly I left the Harry Potter I was then in the airport on St. Thomas. In many ways, I’ve felt like I was leading somebody else’s life ever since.

  The Afterword

  Funny, I haven’t thought about these things for so long.

  When I returned to New York, I never went back to ballet class. I never went back to the opera.

  I lie. I did return once. I did not show up for rehearsals or performances at the opera, and finally this came to the attention of the General Manager’s office. Mr. Bing’s secretary, Florence, called me as I was packing to go back to Michigan and asked me to come see Mr. Bing Wednesday at two-thirty. I remember that.

  I did, dressing very neatly, wearing a jacket and tie. Haircut. Mr. Bing was cautious. “Why aren’t you reporting to work?” he asked politely with his faint Viennese accent from behind his desk, his polished pate nodding towards me. He had those kind eyes, brown–the great difference physically between Antony Tudor and him. He didn’t call me by name.

  I lied slightly, or distorted my real reasons for avoiding the opera. “Mr. Tudor demanded that I sleep with him in exchange for dancing the lead role in his new ballet. It was a shock to me.”

  Mr. Bing blinked. Clearly he was struggling with a new idea. I’m sure he had never heard that a ballet boy was shocked that someone wanted to sleep with him. “And you didn’t want to do that?”

  “It was a shock,” I repeated. Later, when I saw Harold Pinter’s plays, I was reminded of this interview. The calm emptiness of our dialogue didn’t match well with the subject being discussed.

  “A shock, yes. You’re sure that was what he wanted?” Mr. Bing asked.

  “Quite sure. Positive. There was no doubt,” I said. It did sound like a drawing-room play of some kind.

  “What did he say?” Mr. Bing wanted to know. There was a gleam in his eye, the voyeur’s gleam. Mr. Bing may have been a gentleman, but he was not an innocent gentleman. Perhaps not even a very nice gentleman.

  “I don’t think you want to hear that, Mr. Bing,” I said.

  “I will have to ask him about this,” Mr. Bing said. “It seem so unlikely.”

  Yes, I thought. About as unlikely as the Pope’s being Catholic. I felt myself being pivoted into the wrong. Even then, young and stupid as I was, I knew the one thing that threw people off when they were trying to manipulate you into a position was to not act as they expected you to. Clearly Mr. Bing expected me to get angry and sputter and protest. I didn’t. Or wise off. I said nothing. Only sat and looked at Mr. Bing.

  He went on, “What if Antony … Mr. Tudor … denies it?”

  “He would, wouldn’t he?” I said. In a businesslike voice. I felt I was gaining the upper hand by remaining calm. Perhaps I was lying. It didn’t matter. What mattered was how one played the hand. Somehow, I was playing it correctly.

  “You’re not trying to leave the opera before the end of the season to go to another company, are you?” Mr. Bing’s matter-of-fact voice was beginning to sound a little sinister. As though more brutal interrogation might be in store if I didn’t answer fully. He wasn’t German for nothing. I know, I know, he was Austrian. For some of us it’s the same thing.

  “No, I’m not going to dance anymore. Anywhere. I’m going back to Michigan. I’m going to college next fall.”

  “Oh, where?” It seemed the conversation about Antony Tudor was over. And my Met contract. And all the rest of it.

  “I’m not sure. The University of Michigan, if I can get in.”

  Mr. Bing stood up. “Well, I certainly wish you all the luck in the world.” Still no name. Perhaps he wasn’t sure what my name was. “Of course, you won’t be paid after this date, you know that.”

  “Of course,” I said, smiled, and walked out. I didn’t shake his hand. His young secretary said good-bye. A nice girl. Florence was probably a society girl. Maybe even with some money. She had no idea where she was working.

  Minda Meryl called as soon as I was back in my cold-water flat. It was really bare-looking now. I was letting Alfred take it over and was leaving the Salvation Army furniture for him. What he wanted of it. But all the little personal things, pictures and ornaments, were packed up, or I had given them away.

  “How’d it go?” Minda asked.

  “He questioned whether I was telling the truth. But he didn’t make any effort to keep me,” I said.

  “The old trout.” That’s all she said. “Come on over about eight. We’ll go out for a splendid dinner tonight before you leave.”

  Minda had been a “brick through the whole ugly mess,” as she put it. I had cried my way back from St. Thomas. Cried all over my apartment and all over her apartment. Cried on the phone to my mother. For Belle-Mère, the Tudor story was sufficient. Minda had to be told the Rex-Illy story, even the part about my driving Illy out of my life by pretending I was in love with him. I wasn’t very proud of that.

  Minda had dealt with things head-on when we first talked about it. “There are times in this business where you either become a slut or get out, Harry. I think you should get out. I knew you’d never sleep with the sleazy people like Antony Tudor to get ahead, but you could drift into a three-way and very casual sex hanging around men like Rex Ames. Sex pushes us into strange highways and byways.”

  I said nothing. Stopping dancing was like coming off oxygen for me. It was going to be a struggle trying to breathe in the normal world.

  Giving up Rex was something else. That was beyond breathing. That was amputation, self-amputation. Like a wolf chewing off its own leg to escape from a trap.

  “I know, I know, I know,” Minda said in one of our long conversations. “It’s like some kind of horrible tropical infection. You think you’ve gotten rid of it but it just keeps cropping up. Hopefully, it doesn’t linger on in your bowels forever. My first husband was like that. He was a lion tamer–tiger tamer, in fact. It took forever to get over him. I really married Josh as a kind of antidote. I knew I couldn’t be in love with two men at the same time. He was everything Josh isn’t. His name was Roman. Can you imagine?”

  “He was like what?” I said.

  “Arrogant, self-centered, domineering, childish, violent,” Minda said.

  “Don’t hold back. It’s no good repressing everything,” I said, laughing.

  “Unfaithful, crazy, handsome, and that’s the good part,” she added.

  “Why did you marry him, for God’s sake?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I never liked him. He insisted on it. Of course, he may have been a fucking maniac, but he was a maniac fucki
ng. Insane people can be great in bed. I’m here to testify to it.”

  “He sounds great. You’re sure it wasn’t Rex?”

  “In an earlier manifestation, or half-life. No, he’s still alive, Roman. Torturing some millionairess in New Jersey. They keep tigers right there on the farm. They eat a cow a day or something like that.”

  “Not alive, I hope,” I said.

  “I think not.” We both laughed. “I can laugh, but you never get over being one of the walking wounded, Harry. You’re younger than I was. I was twenty-four when I met him, twenty-six when I left him. I used singing as a kind of drug to keep him at bay in my heart and my crotch. Poor Harry.”

  She looked at me and she really had a sad expression on her face, sitting there at her kitchen table. “You’re not even going to have dancing to tide you over. I know it all seems very hopeless now, and I don’t want to sound like some smiley-face Pollyanna, but I can promise you that someday you’ll be interested in things you can’t even imagine now. Even though it seems as if everything and everyone you’ve ever been interested in is swept from your life.

  “And one thing more. It’s all right to have an all-consuming love. In fact, it’s a must. But once you’ve had it, Harry, you don’t need another one.”

  It was good advice. It was true, I was to come to find out. But it took a long time.

  When I came out of Minda’s building to go back alone to my dingy apartment, the sun fell on a little tree standing alone against a red brick wall at the end of the block. One little tree with its new, bright green leaves trembling in the spring wind. Alone in a square of bright sun against that glowing wall, everything in shadow around it. I thought, You don’t have to have a reason to live. You live because you are alive. Like that little tree, I am alive and I will keep on living. Because my heart is beating and I’m breathing. I’ll never have to have a reason to live again. Not a person, not a thing. I live because I am alive. That’s enough.

  My mother said, “Come on home, honey.”

  Minda said, “Go home, Harry.”

  So I went home. I sat around my hometown for a month or two. I didn’t even take my dance clothes with me. I just left them in that empty front room, hanging over the barre.

  All Alfred said when he came to get the key was, “Perhaps it’s best that the only people who stay in New York are people who were born in New York.” I knew Alfred felt New York was too crowded because so many people moved there from out of town. I was doing my part to return New York to normal. I was moving back home.

  I didn’t stay there long. I stared out the window as the crocuses were followed by forsythias, the hyacinths by tulips. Dandelions were infesting the front lawn when I wrote the registrar’s office at the University of Michigan for an application. Belle-Mère kept her counsel, made meals, taught her kiddie classes, and didn’t discuss ballet. She did ask if I wouldn’t like to teach a class or two. Then said, “I guess not.” I refused to look at her.

  The rest is history. It all seems very brief and inevitable actually. I started in the literary college, studying English literature. Then changed to pre-med. I did my medical school there and met my wife there. I found the job at St. Vincent’s after graduating. We had the girls. Antonia has moved around a little from one clinic to another, but now she’s established at that place down on St. Mark’s Place. That place on the Place.

  We’ve moved a couple of times. Now we have a really nice house on Greenwich Street in the Village. With three bedrooms, so the girls can have their own rooms and share a bathroom. All quite lavish compared to Sixteenth Street. When Belle-Mère visits, one of the girls goes to her sister’s room. They take turns.

  Do I fool around? With guys? That’s the big question, isn’t it?

  I think of it. Who wouldn’t? But I’d have to fall in love first, and I don’t want to fall in love. It would have to creep up on me. There is no place in my life for falling in love. It’s all occupied. I’m quite aware that I’ve done this deliberately. I’m sure my wife is aware of it, too. I’m barricaded behind my hospital schedule, the girls, school plays, the PTA meetings, holidays in Europe, going to the theater. When would anyone ever see enough of me that I could fall in love with them? It’s impossible, and it’s an impossibility I created myself. So be it.

  My happiness will never come from fulfilling my duties to others. That’s like brushing your teeth. Of course you do it.

  I had my happiness. I overdosed on it. I’ve been on automatic ever since. And I’m fine, I assure you. I’m perfectly fine.

  Harry Thinks About Love

  Marilyn Monroe recorded a song called “After You Get What You Want You Don’t Want It.” She sang it in her little baby-doll voice and at the very end interpolated “I know you” in her speaking voice. Marilyn, you were so right. So right. All the time I was balancing back and forth between Illy and Rex, they were interested. Because the ball wasn’t really in their court. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I wasn’t thinking that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with either one of them. So the pressure was off. As soon as I concentrated on Rex it fell apart.

  Love is such a weird thing. It seems to be all about need. Either we need to be loved, or we need to love. Needing to be loved is probably the most usual and the most normal. Selfish, selfish human beings. I often meet women nowadays who want so much to be married, have a lover, something. So I ask them, What would you be willing to accept in a lover? What faults could he have? Could he be missing a limb? Or an eye? Could he have a low income with no prospects for a better one? Or no income? Could he be a widower or a divorced man with children? And one of the children has a major health problem? Cerebral palsy? The answers are always no, no, no, no, no, no. To anything except a good-looking, single lover with a good income and no children. Okay, maybe children, but no health problems, please.

  Conclusion: We want to be loved, but the love can’t come with any baggage. How realistic is that? After a certain age, everyone comes with baggage.

  Love doesn’t come without problems. I think people have it all wrong. Being loved is one of the least interesting situations you can find yourself in. Being loved gives you all the power in the situation. But in a funny way, you’re not getting anything out of it. Your own emotions are just lying there, doing nothing. There is nothing worse than sleeping with someone when you don’t feel like it. Nothing. For men, of course, it’s usually just out of the question if you can’t get it up. But women can just lie there. Maybe that’s what many women do all their lives and don’t have any idea that it would be quite different if you loved that person lying on top of you pumping away.

  And of course, there’s loving someone and being in love with someone. People say there’s a difference. I don’t really get it. I think being in love is loving. It’s quite clearly different from being sexually attracted. The difference revolves around kissing, I think. If you really love kissing someone, that indicates to me that you’re in love with them. If you don’t feel like kissing them but you like fucking them, that’s sexual attraction. In some ways, kissing is more personal than fucking. Rex always said to me, “You’re the only one I kiss.” Which, at the time, I thought was pretty ridiculous. I was supposed to not mind all the middle-aged Johns from out of town he was screwing, because he wasn’t kissing them. Now I have a better view of the whole thing. Rex was sort of like an electric stove: you turned on the burner and he heated up. He was Italian; maybe that’s the way Italian men work. But kissing someone indicated for him that he was actually aware of the person he was fucking. It wasn’t just a warm place to put his penis. I guess I should have been flattered.

  Anyway, there is that difference. I see it as three entirely different categories.

  Sexual attraction. Obviously only good for as long as you’re attracted. Some people know how to spin that out for a long time by limiting the amount of sexual contact distributed to others. I guess this is pretty much a female thing. Men who are sexually attracted to another man ar
en’t going to hang around very long if there is sexual rationing going on. Unless it’s a much older man and his little tootsie. Diaghilev and Lifar. That kind of thing.

  Then there’s being in love. Which has to do with some sort of necessary life experience. I really think when you lie down to die, you really don’t feel good about the whole thing because you were president of a big company. Or a famous painter. Or gave millions to help the poor. I think you feel you lived because you felt a lot. You really felt those tidal waves of emotion sweep over you, caused by the fact that someone else exists. That’s what I think we want. We want to feel that thing. There are people who back away from it because it makes them feel too much and they’re afraid of those feelings. They go to their graves feeling they missed the boat, and they did.

  If you believe in reincarnation, they’ll only have to come back again and see if they can screw up enough courage to fall in love and be swept off their feet into unmanageable situations. Love isn’t for control freaks. Earning millions of dollars and running the lives of others is for control freaks.

  It’s funny. You see these guys coming into the hospital who have control-freaked their way to the top, and now they have everything under control. Surprise! They have controlled themselves right out of contact with any other human being. It’s a very big punishment, success. You don’t dare ever be alone.

  Then there’s love. The kind of love you feel for children, your family, your friends, and your pets. It’s a strong feeling, but it doesn’t come out of genetic programming. So it isn’t powerful. Except for a mother’s love for her child, and not all mothers have that. I don’t think mine did. I don’t think my wife has it. Antonia should have it in spades–she’s Italian. But there’s something cold about how she handles her responsibilities as a mother. She’ll go to school and discuss problems with the teacher. And she’ll reassure the girls when they start worrying about God. Or if they’re pretty enough. That kind of stuff. But I don’t get the feeling there’s any kind of blood rush about it. She isn’t like a mother lion defending her cubs. It’s more that she knows what a mother’s responsibilities are, and she will never fail to discharge them well. She’s very upper-class. I, on the other hand, am not.