The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  So do I love my wife? I have to say that I was never in love with her. I was in admire with her. Our marriage was like a train that pulls into the station and it is obvious you are supposed to climb aboard and travel away on it. Staying behind in the empty station has no point to it. If Antonia hadn’t come over from Italy to finish her training, if we hadn’t met in my last year of med school, and, probably most important, if she hadn’t decided she wanted to marry me, most likely I’d still be single. I certainly haven’t ever felt I needed to get married to be a convincing subject for advancement at the hospital. I don’t really care if I advance or not. I like taking care of people. And I get the chance to. Dancing was my career. That’s over. This is my work. Whether I’m an important doctor or not couldn’t interest me less. It interests Antonia. She really wants to be head of that children’s clinic, and I’m sure she will be. In many ways she’s the man in the couple we make. She even looks like a Roman senator now that she’s gone gray and cut her hair short. I wouldn’t want to overstate that. She was beautiful when we met and still is.

  What about the sex? Sex with Antonia is definitely in the sexual-attraction section of human relationships. My body responds to her body and we get it on. We don’t kiss much. Never did. Our life together is a real life based on doing real things. It has nothing to do with fulfilling deep-seated emotional goals. At least for me, it doesn’t. That was all over once I left Illy and Rex behind. I think I learned what there was to learn and that I won’t do that again. At least I hope I won’t have to. Whether Antonia has a need to fulfill herself emotionally beyond me, I don’t know. We have never discussed it. We probably will never discuss it.

  Let’s face it, if we didn’t have our demanding jobs, the two girls, and the house to deal with, I’m not sure what we would be doing with each other. But that’s a very abstract question. We do have our responsibilities and they are all-consuming. At the moment, I have to believe many people’s lives are like this. I notice that I say “I have to believe” quite often. I guess I do.

  Back to being “in love.” Finally, I guess I’d have to say that I was “in love” with Rex Ames and “in lust” with Illy Ilquist. And that’s where it stands. The kind of “in lust” I had with Illy had its monumental side. I never got tired of sleeping with him. There was something about his physical presence that always made me feel sexual. And his penis, if we’re going to be really up-front. He was a kind of penis with a person attached. His life revolved around it for the most part. And I did too, when we were involved with each other.

  What did I know about love? Nothing. But it was clear to me that something was going on with Rex Ames that wasn’t happening with Illy. I made my decision on that basis, to throw in my lot with Rex. Which, as it turned out, was of little or no interest to Rex at all. So much for love and being in love.

  Illy’s Death

  Illy died. I wasn’t there. “Who is Harry?” the nurse said the next day. “He was calling for Harry over and over.” I said nothing. I’m Dr. Potter to her. If she looked up my first name in the files it would say Harold. Some of the other doctors at the hospital call me Harry, but most doctors aren’t known by their first names or called by their first names.

  I wasn’t surprised by that information. I don’t know how I feel about not being there. I wish I’d been there only because Illy had called for me. But for myself, I can’t say my life is more empty with his passing. It has been empty with his absence for almost thirty years.

  I never saw Illy after he died. The body had been taken away when I reported in to the hospital. A woman friend had claimed the body. It must have been Anne. The nurse said she had been told that the body was to be cremated. I wonder if Anne planned to return his ashes to Minnesota. That I didn’t care about. The dead body is like a sort of old overcoat, a suit of worn-out clothes, once the wearer has flown. Often, when I pass a cemetery, I think how ridiculous those rows and rows of stone look, holding down all those empty black suits and worn-out black dresses. There is no one there. There never was. Only expensive boxes holding ill-assorted fragments of neutrons and protons, trying to leap apart and re-form into other elements. The spirit that once made those scraps of bone, muscle, and flesh beautiful and lovable has gone.

  I never told Illy about the letter I’d gotten from Robby Schmidt after he had gotten to California. I’m not paranoid, but perhaps I should have been a little bit. As some people are destined to play positive roles in your life, evidently there are others who are there to have a malignant influence. Mine was Robby. His letter went:

  You silly bitch,

  I grew tired of your attempts at controlling my life in such an obvious and contemptible way. The price I had to pay in emotional subservience was not worth the petty physical comforts you provided.

  Now I am in California far from your harmful grasp. You always were a pathetic cunt, even at the Opera. You conned everyone into thinking you were such a sweet, virginal young thing, but I saw through you. I knew better and always could perceive the deceit and manipulation. I figured out that you were sleeping with both Ilquist and Ames, our two best dancers, so you could control them and gain ascendance over them. I told Tudor that. You never knew I lined up boys for him, did you? There was a lot you didn’t know, you idiotic faggot. He was one of the few that saw through you and your ridiculous conceit as I did.

  I told Ilquist and Ames, too. While you were doing all those rehearsals with Tudor for that ballet, and rehearsed spinning around on his cock, too, I’m sure. I should have had that lead role, but you made sure that I was relegated to the least important role. I told your lovers, “Why don’t you guys just go somewhere and fuck.” They did. Ha, ha, ha. Anything to escape from you, you evil twat.

  I’m telling you all this just in case you think I’m ungrateful. No one needs to be grateful to the sheer evil that is you.

  Wishing you all the worst,

  Robert

  Well. I read the letter very quickly. I could hardly bear to keep my eyes on the pages. I didn’t reread it, just crumpled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. I guess you could categorize it as the worst letter I ever received in my life, on quite a few levels. It was all pretty clear. I had been playing in a league that was way over my head. A major league of ambition and deception I hardly perceived, even when I was up to my neck in it. I had been chewed up and spat out. Robby made that very clear. But then indeed, who wasn’t? Certainly there were no winners among Robby, Illy, Rex, Tudor, and me. Rex maybe. An unknown quantity, but he has never surfaced on Broadway or in Hollywood to my knowledge. He had done a lead in an off-Broadway musical based on a Shakespearean play in which he had colored his hair blond; that I knew. I had seen the ads in the New York Times Sunday edition, which we got in Michigan. But nothing more after that. Did he borrow that money from me just to even the score? Somehow I don’t think he even cared that much. He just wanted to go to St. Thomas with Illy and figured out a way to do it.

  After-Afterword

  Now it is a month later. Illy died at St. Vincent’s and my life has gone on as though nothing had happened. My wife just became the director of the clinic where she has worked for so long. This was always her goal, and she is content in having achieved it. Like many psychologists, she is not very aware of the emotions that surge within the people she sees daily.

  One daughter has abandoned her plans for a career as a geophysicist and now plans to live on the Main Line in Philadelphia with a doctor husband and two children. Good luck to her.

  The other daughter, the younger, is very involved with computers. In what way, I can’t exactly tell you. I know I can’t hope she’ll outgrow it.

  Two weeks ago, while I was crossing Seventh Avenue near the hospital, my evil genius, Robby, emerged in my life again. He wasn’t in California very long. I wondered whom he had conned for the return fare.

  “Oh, hi,” he said, smiling brightly, or as brightly as he could with the two or three teeth left to him. I didn’t mention his letter
. He probably wouldn’t have remembered it. That was another channel, another life. “Where ya going?” he wanted to know. I didn’t tell him Illy had just died. I said, “To class.” He looked to see if I was carrying a dance bag.

  Then he said, “I saw Rex Ames last week.” Now it was my turn to wonder what year it was. “He asked about you. I told him you were a famous doctor now.”

  “Where did you see him?” I asked cautiously. With Robby, he might have met him in a hallucination.

  “On Eighth Street. He was just up here for the day seeing some old trick of his, I guess. He lives in Baltimore now. He’s a waiter. You should call him. He’d like it.”

  “I’m never in Baltimore,” I said.

  Robby was playing the role of the old pal. When we had never been old pals. “We should get together. We have a lot of old times to talk about,” he said.

  “Too many,” I said. And left him standing like a grizzled garden gnome on Bleecker Street.

  I have come to believe in destiny. That all things must unfold in their own time. Our path, no matter how we may want to leave it, is our path to tread alone. There is no hurrying down it to get to a better part, or lingering upon it to enjoy the present moment more. We move along it inexorably.

  The next day there was a letter on my desk inviting me to a doctors’ convention in Baltimore the following month. At the Peabody Hotel. I asked my secretary to accept it. I could have turned it down, but decided to cooperate with destiny.

  I called information for Rex Ames’s telephone number in Baltimore. I called and an answering machine came on. As I started to leave a message, Rex came on the line. His voice was still sonorous, with a thick edge that gave me the beginning of an erection.

  I told him I was coming to Baltimore and suggested we meet. He didn’t ask how I happened to know he was in Baltimore. He said he was working most evenings as a waiter but the Sunday I was arriving he would be free. I told him I would arrive in the late afternoon. I suggested eating at the hotel. He agreed.

  “You were quite a little fuck bunny,” Rex said.

  “You were the love of my life,” I said.

  “I know. Kismet. It is written in the stars. I loved you as much as I ever loved anybody, Harry. You were the only one I ever kissed.”

  “You wouldn’t want to sleep with me now?”

  “No. You know I never slept with anyone on the spur of the moment.” He laughed and took a sip of his double martini.

  I felt relieved.

  There were moments when Rex was still handsome in the shadows of the restaurant dining room. In the turn of his head, the flash of his still-excellent teeth, the Rex I knew was there. He seemed shorter–or was I taller? His torso bulged under the thick sweater he wore. His taut body was gone. His face wasn’t wrinkled but drawn and pale like parchment, making his large dark eyes even larger. He was nervous, and his smile flashed on and off with no connection to our conversation.

  At no time did Rex ask why I was in Baltimore, what my profession was, anything about my marriage or my children. Although he must have known something of all this from Robby. It had always been important to Rex not to appear interested in other people, and much of his lack of interest wasn’t feigned. I don’t think he ever was very interested in other people.

  “I brought these pictures,” Rex said, and pushed a small cardboard album across the table. “Remember these?”

  I opened the small book. In the front were black-and-white Polaroid photographs of a woman who must have been his mother. “Polaroids,” Rex said. “They didn’t even have color Polaroid then. Only black-and-white.” His mother, posing stiffly, smiled timidly in a black dress against plaster walls and Venetian blinds. In some, her head posed in profile or turned upwards in an attempt at an “artistic” pose. Suggested by photographer Rex, I’m sure.

  Then there were pictures of me. “I don’t remember these,” I said. “You must have seen them,” Rex said, tipping the top of the little album down with one hand to check what I was looking at while lifting some salad to his mouth with the other. I was being careful to keep the album out of my bean-and-broccoli soup.

  “No, never. I’m sure I’ve never seen these.” There were Polaroids of me seated on a bed in a white shirt and a sweater. A tan cardigan, it was. My best sweater. There was one photograph of me standing at a door, my profile reflected in a wall mirror. I looked good. I looked handsome, lively, animated, even beautiful. My profile looked not bad in the mirror. I hate my profile. Not enough chin.

  “My hair looks nice,” I said.

  “You always had beautiful hair,” Rex said.

  It did look good, my hair. Glossy, silky, falling over one eye in some shots. My hair was honey-colored then. Not blond-blond. I seemed relaxed, smiling, turning to look at the camera as I sprawled on the bed. Nothing at all as I remember myself. Tormented with desire. Exhausted with ballet classes. I had never thought of myself as alluring or fuckable. It wasn’t that I had thought of myself as not being fuckable, I’d just never thought I was. A clear-skinned, shiny-eyed, gleaming-haired young man looked back at me. In only one, where I clasped Rex’s dog in my arms on a couch, did I look like myself, as I remember it. Tremulous, a little sad. That poor dog. Poor me.

  “Let me keep these photographs to make some copies, Rex,” I said. He had no objection. I put them in my pocket.

  On my way to Baltimore, I had thought that after dinner perhaps Rex and I would go to my room and make love in that savage, senseless way we used to. Few preliminaries. Just a long, pounding mounting of my body by Rex.

  I had no desire to do this with today’s Rex, and he clearly didn’t, either. We talked about opera for the most part during dinner. He now had a great passion for it. I didn’t remember him being so passionate about opera when we were dancers. Now he said how thrilled he was to find a CD of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers at his local record store.

  He leaned over and squeezed my shoulder as we ate our shrimp creole (me) and lamb cutlets (him). “Your shoulders are tense,” he said. It wasn’t a come-on for a later massage. “I think I’m just strong,” I said. He demonstrated simple exercises of bending the head backwards and forwards and from side to side to relieve tension and stretch the muscles. “Keep your chin in,” he said, as he demonstrated them for me. “That’s not hard,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with your chin. There never was,” he said. Almost paternally. Certainly with affection.

  Rex talked about his job as a waiter with all the enthusiasm he had once talked about dancing a lead for a Valerie Bettis recital. He was well respected at the restaurant, one of Baltimore’s best, he assured me. He had the best tables and he didn’t have to bus. It didn’t make me feel sad. But distant, distant, distant. The other Rex was far, far away.

  It was something like Lina Wertmüller’s film Swept Away. We had been two lovers alone on a desert island so long ago. We didn’t love each other anymore. But I think we both loved the memory of that love. At least I did. I don’t know about Rex. I don’t know what he thought. It was important to him, as I’ve said, that no one did.

  We finished dessert, we went to the lobby, we hugged goodbye. “Your body feels good,” he said.

  “I exercise every day,” I told him.

  “That’s good,” he said. And walked away. With that cocky, feet-out walk short men often have. Shoulders back, head up. Another dancer would be able to tell immediately that Rex himself had once been a dancer.

  In my room, I undressed slowly. The conference started tomorrow. I didn’t look forward to it. Rex and I hadn’t made any plan to see each other again while I was in Baltimore. He was only free in the daytime, and I was going to be tied up with the conference every day. I am forty-eight. Rex must be fifty or over. I saw a funny gay card in a bookstore just last week. On it was a 1940s-type illustration of a gray-haired professional type smoking a pipe. In the balloon from his head it said, “God, he was handsome. He had big muscles and a big car. I’ll bet he’s still thinking about m
e.” In a lower corner there’s another 1940s-style drawing of an older man looking upwards. This man’s balloon reads, “Get a grip on yourself. That was in high school.”

  At the top the card reads, “How Long Is Too Long?” Exactly.

  I snapped on the radio. It was playing Rachmaninoff. That terribly sad one that wraps up all there is to say or feel about love and longing. I started to dance in my sleeveless undershirt and Jockey shorts. My legs are still good, I still have buttocks, and my stomach is flat, and I have pectorals.

  Other people in the privacy of their rooms may drink. Or masturbate. I dance when I’m alone, and that is rarely. When there is classical music on the radio.

  I danced. Slow-revolving pirouettes, deep first arabesque, piqué to second. I can still do all that stuff. My body has never changed. Only I have. It’s a tough thing, this life. It can break your heart if you let it.