* * *
—
When I got back to the apartment, they were watching Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. The room had a bready, hungover smell.
“Well, well, well!” said Brookie, squinting. “If it isn’t—Semi, right?”
On his lap was the rotund boy, whose name I either still did not know or else kept forgetting. Cherry Cerise perched beside them on the armrest, filing her nails and looking nonplussed.
“So good of you to drop by, what with your many civic commitments,” said Brookie. He launched into a tuneless rendition of “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake.”
“Shh,” said Paulie. “They’re finding out that Wild Child was raised by Bigfoot!”
“I can’t believe you take this show seriously,” said Stephen.
“Is this the one where the guy drowns in his soup?” I said.
“We should all be so lucky,” said Brookie. “I’m starving.”
As if on cue, his stomach made a sound like a plucked guitar string.
“I take it completely seriously,” said Paulie. “I take it post-seriously.”
“We’re all terribly hungry!” Brookie was using his protest voice now.
“I’m not,” said the boy in his lap. “I just had a sandwich.”
“You are a marvel of literalism,” said Stephen.
“Shh,” said Brookie, leaning forward and stroking the boy’s ears. “Can’t you see the child’s delirious?”
“I think I saw an orange peel in the hallway,” I said.
“Save Our Children!” Brookie shrieked. “Where is Anita Bryant when you need her?”
“I give up,” said Paulie, turning off the television. “There you go, Brookie. You win. Activism works.”
Brookie was staring at me with moist, charity-pamphlet eyes. Hungry, he mouthed again, and I lost it.
“What do you want me to do—breastfeed you? Because I’ve got some bad news on that front.”
Cherry Cerise laughed at this, which surprised us all.
“Doesn’t your rich boyfriend give you an allowance?” said Brookie.
“No, actually.” I was trying to channel my grandmother’s most frigid, Plasticine rage. “And he makes eighty dollars a week. By working.”
“I see.” Brookie waved a hand grandly. “So you’re viewing this whole thing as an investment. How very prudent of you.”
“This is better than Mary Hartman,” whispered Paulie.
“No, it isn’t,” said Brookie’s boy matter-of-factly, and for a moment I nearly liked him.
“Say what you will about the bourgeois,” Brookie said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me, though he spoke as though to the entire room. “They can’t be beat for sheer financial literacy.”
I felt a dark, lacerating anger coming loose inside of me. I grabbed my mail from the counter to explain why I’d come back in the first place. Then I left again, and stayed away for longer.
* * *
—
That summer, it seemed, I did not sleep.
Night after night, I lay beside Matthew, miserably awake. Occasionally I snuck up to the roof to stare at the skyline—at the offices where hundreds of closet cases no doubt still were working, no matter what the hour. Everyone was an amateur arsonist in those days: landlords setting fires to get insurance, residents setting fires to get public housing. Addicts vulturing through afterward to steal metal from the fixtures. There’d be upwards of twelve thousand fires that year, Matthew would tell me later—but you could feel it even then, that impulse toward mass self-annihilation. I thought of it as I listened to the alarms going off around the city: the alarms that sent everyone running, the alarms that everyone ignored, the alarms that brought the red caps racing up the stairs into the buildings. I thought of it when I crept back down to pretend to sleep beside Matthew—to watch him dream unknowable dreams and wonder if, underneath all the noise, some new silence was growing between us. I listened for this silence intently, the way the rest of the city listened for the step of Son of Sam. I tried to hear it beneath the sound of David Byrne blasting from car radios. I tried to sniff it underneath the smoke—the smoke that smelled like camping, the smoke that smelled like the apocalypse. I tried to glimpse it somewhere in those strange summer darknesses: the blackouts that were listless and perfunctory, the ones that were urgent and anarchic. The one when the air outside the window became a rotating constellation of blue glow sticks. They waved and vanished, like electric eels cartwheeling into the abyss, and in the morning it turned out that most of Bushwick had been destroyed.
* * *
—
By the New Year, Matthew had either developed or revealed an entire political idiom, full of slogans and shorthand. He railed against “poverty pimps” and something called the “mandate millstone.” He lambasted Cuomo’s position on abortion. He was skeptical of the value of corruption as a campaign issue; he believed the real issue was low- and middle-income housing. Voters wanted a candidate who’d address the problem at its fundamentals, rather than eternally fussing about with rent control. Crime was an issue, undeniably, he said, but much more so for the poor than the wealthy. In view of the state’s inability to exercise its basic function of locking up criminals, the rich were finding ways to lock up themselves: hiring private security apparatuses, buying top-shelf locks and security devices, encircling themselves with iron gates through their block associations.
“People are literally erecting barricades!” he shouted at me once. “Retreating into castles, digging moats. Filling them with water and bears.”
“Bears?”
He told me they used to do this in Czechoslovakia.
It was like listening to a physics lecture in an unstudied language—though I wasn’t so much bored as incredulous. A recent Times profile of Matthew had mentioned the copy of City of Night he kept in his downtown office—where, it was further noted, he spent many evenings working late. Since then, the sotto voce speculations about him had become marginally less sotto. It was true that he was not a Greenwich Village bachelor, as my grandmother might have put it; Alice was some alibi, anyway. But Matthew would never be able to run the sort of emphatically heterosexual ads people liked to see. He had barely invoked Alice at all when he ran for State Assembly. Maybe he knew that they were never completely convincing as a couple—she had a damp small-minded look about her that would cast doubt on any man’s heterosexuality—and there were, of course, no children, which was what was really meant by “family.” It didn’t take a political savant to figure all of this out, and I wasn’t the person who was supposed to be one.
He would, I thought, make a very good mayor. And I knew that if Matthew were anyone else, I’d tell him to fuck prudence and fuck discretion and hey, while we’re at it, fuck Alice; I’d tell him to put on a dress and run for fucking president. I’d tell him I’d take the bus up to New Hampshire to register voters myself! But Matthew wasn’t anyone else: he was only himself, and there was only one of him, and the fact of his stubborn singularity scrambled my principles in a way that made me hateful.
Was I asking him to choose? I didn’t want to think so. But neither did I imagine myself by his side, in pearls and pillbox hat, beaming as the results came in at the Limelight. The whole thing was impossible. I pondered this impossibility on bracing walks that winter, watching the whitecaps bob in Long Island Sound. I pondered it while tramping around the Lower East Side that summer, the wind rattling across the Manhattan Bridge like an oncoming train, feeling wretched in a way I somehow associated with my own misbehavior as a child. I pondered it as I lay in Matthew’s bed that autumn, while the random smell of toast fluttered up from someone’s apartment.
“This is impossible,” I said. I think I thought he was asleep.
He turned over. “Nothing’s impossible.” He cradled himself around me.
; “Aren’t some things, though?” I said.
He kissed me. He smelled of Tide and city and late-night coffee. He seemed to think this settled the question.
* * *
—
The boys and I were uptown, in November, when we heard that Harvey Milk had been killed. Without discussion, we turned back toward Sheridan Square. We shivered while waiting for the subway: we were underdressed for the weather, overdressed for the N train. We’d been planning to go dancing. Instead, we watched as an extremely shiny rat dragged a muffin across the tracks.
“This city won’t ever have a Harvey to murder,” said Brookie loudly, and an MTA policeman gave us a sour look.
“Shh,” said Nick. “Don’t make him use his walkie-talkie.”
“They don’t work underground,” I said, and they all looked at me.
Our train pulled into the station. It was bombed with unreadable black snarls, like the scribbling of a psychotic child.
“Mesdames,” said Brookie. “Your hearse awaits.”
In the park, everyone had candles. We hugged each other gingerly, around the flames. Then Brookie went off to talk to someone, and Nick and Peter went off to smoke with someone else, and I was left standing with Stephen near the statue of the general, watching two dowdy teenagers weep. Paulie was away in Italy that fall—he’d been cast in some sort of touring commedia dell’arte and sent us elated postcards every single week. The whole thing sounded awful. Things were much quieter without him.
“He was such a brave man,” I said abruptly.
I meant Harvey. I was glad Matthew was not so brave.
“Those who live by the sword,” said Stephen.
“Well, not only them.” I watched the teenagers, wondering how old they were, what they were sneaking away from to be here.
“I don’t think that horse is even real.” Stephen was pointing across the street, where a couple of boys in bell-bottoms were clustered around a mounted policeman.
“Of course it’s real,” I said. “I mean, they’re petting it, aren’t they?”
It was very clear I needed to start going out more.
But in fact the boys were losing interest already, and dispersing. I watched to see where the prettiest one would go; my line of vision tilted to follow him across the park, until it slammed directly into Matthew Miller.
My mouth went dry—just as it had the first time I’d seen him on television, or the night he’d materialized at the club, or any of the other times when his appearance had seemed a miracle too hopelessly complete to be real—and for a moment I was seized by that old wrenching tenderness, that doomed euphoria, of love not worth the naming. Any other politician in Matthew’s position would have been too afraid to show up here; any politician not in his position wouldn’t have thought of it at all. But this was Matthew Miller, world-class hypocrite and true progressive, and he was unafraid of courting the gay vote.
I had to get out of there. But then, as though moved by some predatory instinct, Brookie was upon me.
“Look who’s here!” he said, poking me in the ribs. “It’s our patron saint. But who’s this friend he’s with?”
Next to Matthew stood a very blond man in a very puce scarf.
“Is this the competition? Because if it is, honey, I can’t say I like your odds. Let’s say hello.”
“Let’s not.”
“Why not? I never get to talk to liberal closet cases. And that little friend of his is just a peach.”
“Brookie.”
“And isn’t Saint Matthew technically my lawyer, too? Are you trying to strip me of my constitutional right to representation?”
“Brookie.”
“This is one step short of disenfranchisement! Don’t make me alert the NAACP!”
“Brookie, please.”
He laughed harshly. He could hear there was real desperation in my voice, I think—that in this moment I was actually afraid of him, as small and shitty white people so often were.
“You know what happened to you?” He shook his head. “Never mind. I don’t care. But don’t worry. I won’t embarrass you. You are massively overestimating my interest in this.”
And he went marching off toward Matthew Miller. What could I possibly do but follow?
I suppose I couldn’t have expected Matthew to seem visibly surprised to see me; I certainly didn’t expect him to bend me into a deep embrace. Perhaps I wanted the opposite, then—some contrived coldness that would acknowledge the potential danger of warmth. At the very least, I wanted him to be too afraid to touch me.
Instead, he waved, smiling with a recognition so limited, and so unfeigned, that for a moment I felt my own sanity waver.
“Semi,” he said, and shook my hand—which was one of the few physical encounters we’d not had before. “It’s good to see you.”
Why did Matthew say my name? Because he always, always said voters’ names.
Now he was turning toward the blond man. The social polish bounced off that guy in every direction; he was practically chrome-plated. I loathed him conclusively.
“Semi,” said Matthew. “This is Eddie.”
“I’m Sid,” said Brookie. “This is Nancy.”
“Semi is one of my Village constituents.”
The “Village” explaining why I was the way I was, I guess, and the “constituent” explaining why Matthew Miller was speaking to me at all. All those schizoids and trannies and gray-footed homeless, all those addicts and ingrates and weirdos and fags—like it or not, Matthew Miller worked for these people! Such was the nature of representative democracy!
Matthew and Eddie had begun tag-teaming their condolences. They’d admired Harvey Milk tremendously, they were saying, as both a politician and a man. There were other people waiting to speak to Matthew, I saw—other people he’d want to deliver this speech to, in case he’d need their votes one day. I guess he figured he could count on mine. The eulogy was wrapping down now; the hand-shaking recommencing. Matthew shook hands with Brookie, who bent to kiss his class ring, and then with me—again managing to convey the exact quality of warmth one might extend toward an inconsequential speechwriter from eight years earlier. I stared at the hand manipulating my own. Matthew Miller: a man without secrets.
Then Eddie Marcus was upon me again. Years later, he’d be fired from the water commissioner’s office over an extravagant cocaine habit; there were suspicions he’d been accepting kickbacks to finance it, though this part was never proved. His coke thing was beginning even then, in fact, which may have explained some of his irrational optimism about Matthew’s career. I wish I could say that I’d intuited this: that my hatred stemmed from insight, and not a cramped and lunatic resentment. I wish I could say I saw right through him. But I wasn’t kidding myself—or not as much, anymore. Even as I stood there, I was realizing I might not be able to see through anyone at all.
* * *
—
That night, Matthew showed up at my door—unannounced, hat in hands. This was a scene I’d longed for, once. In the bedroom, I pretended I still did.
Afterward, Matthew rolled over and said: “Eddie thinks I can take it.”
“What?”
And with that, he began officially campaigning.
According to Eddie, he had compassion, energy, consistency; if he presented himself as the tough-talking leftist alternative to Koch, he could be a plausible candidate. Eddie Marcus, evidently, didn’t know the half of it, and I was surprised Matthew would let himself be swayed by such an uninformed opinion. But he kept on talking, his back smooth and warm against my chest, and it occurred to me that in this moment he was happy.
“This is a strange way to commit suicide,” I said, to shut him up.
I felt him freeze in my arms.
“I’m not the only politician with a private life,” he said qu
ietly.
“Have you considered that yours might be a bit more private than most?”
“If the only people who went into public service were people with lives that couldn’t raise an eyebrow, then there wouldn’t be any public servants, and the city would be even more Hobbesian than it is.” He was speaking patiently, pedantically. Practicing for the provocations of televised debate, I suppose.
“So this”—I gestured to myself, to the bedsheets, to him and then the rest of him, then back to myself for good measure—“is all irrelevant. You should have run for Pope while you had the chance!”
“Calm down.”
“What, am I being hysterical?” I said. “Hysterical girls—they just can’t be escaped! I mean, look at the lengths you’ve gone to to do something really original with your personal life, and still it all boils down to the same thing. But hey, maybe you can use that in your speeches! To relate to the average voter. We’ve all been there, right, fellas? See, we ain’t so different, you and me.”
He had rolled far away from me and was curled toward the wall.
“I know I’m not on the payroll anymore, but you can have that one for free.”
I could feel him trying to manage his breathing, which made me want to start again, which made me even angrier.
“I am not saying it’s irrelevant,” he said. “I’m saying that, at the end of the day, everyone has interests. Everyone has liabilities. Everyone understands this.”
“The voice of the progressive insurrection, comrades!” I sounded exactly like Brookie. “You’re talking about mutually assured destruction.”
“I’m talking about whatever it is that keeps people from shoving each other in front of the subway, yeah.”
“They do do that sometimes, you know. You should probably know that if you’re going to be mayor.”
“This isn’t because I don’t love you,” he said.
“Are you—is that you trying to say you do love me? God, you sure talk like a politician.”
The Spectators Page 15