Frederick barely watched the second act. As soon as he took his seat, the young man allowed his thigh to touch Frederick’s. He felt the tightness of the boy’s pants and the taut muscles, the solid flesh beneath the fabric. He sat at war with himself, thinking he shouldn’t indulge this kind of play (there was no doubt the boy knew what he was doing) but enjoying nonetheless the excitement, the danger—and the danger doubled the excitement. Now the young man moved his leg up and down, causing friction, and Frederick felt a pulse through his trousers and a swelling in his crotch.
Eliza was crying and cursing, asking Henry why he hadn’t just left her in the gutter where he found her, for he was taking all the credit for her success at the ball, but Frederick heard and saw almost nothing as, minute by minute, the physical contact between them intensified. The young man placed his arm on the rest, allowing their arms to touch from elbow to fingertips, and caressed Frederick’s little finger with his own finger. Frederick felt the hair on his hand stand up straight. Meanwhile, the young man kept moving his thigh up and down against Frederick, and Frederick gently but firmly pushed his thigh against the young man’s, creating more friction, more tension.
You don’t care. I know you don’t care. You wouldn’t care if I was dead. I’m nothing to you.
Frederick felt a shock as the young man placed his hand squarely upon his knee. He imagined his erection was visible to everyone around him, including the people on stage. But he didn’t move his knee away. He did not, however, feel quite ready to place his hand on top of the boy’s, though he very much wanted just now to hold his hand, to squeeze it and say, hold me close (You and I will always…)—but who was this brazen child to make him feel such things? If this were a trap he might find himself in serious trouble, he thought, trying to adjust his other leg to lessen the friction not just from the boy’s leg pressing against his thigh, and from the boy’s hand upon his knee, but from his own erection now rubbing against his inner thigh, causing acute arousal.
Just then Eliza pleaded with Henry not to hit her. The excitement was becoming unbearable, and Frederick felt he must do something to avert disaster. He gently pulled his leg out from underneath the young man’s hand. But soon as he did, the young man renewed the pressure against his thigh and, simultaneously, placed his arm once again on the rest next to Frederick’s arm and again began brushing Frederick’s hand with his finger. Frederick pulled away again, removing his arm from the rest. He must put a stop to this, it wasn’t right.
At last the cast assembled downstage and bowed. Frederick was glad to have something legitimate to do with his hands. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the young man turn his head towards him, but Frederick maintained a steady gaze at the stage as he clapped vigorously for a performance he’d almost entirely missed. The young man clapped too, going so far as to stick two fingers into his mouth and give a whistle so coarse and piercing the woman in blue over to their right felt compelled to lean forward and shoot them a disapproving look.
The audience began vacating their seats. When Frederick gained the aisle he felt the young man on his heels. He continued moving with the crowd, trying to ignore the young man’s presence. The crowd was thick and slow and Frederick felt great impatience to make his exit and start walking away from the theater, putting the whole escapade behind him. Now all he wanted was to go home, get a good night’s rest (forget going to the Snake Pit), and take care of tomorrow’s chores before leaving for Pennsylvania. At last he reached the sidewalk in front of the theater and started heading towards the subway.
“Hey, where you going?” The young man caught up alongside him. “I just wanted to talk. What are you doing now? I don’t know your name.”
Frederick stopped and turned as if to reprimand him but realized to do so would only further entangle him in a situation he now regretted. He looked at him without saying a word for one, two, three seconds, and the seconds felt like an eternity. Something inside him slipped, like falling off the edge of a cliff, and he’d wanted to kill himself only once, after the breakup with Jon (Listen old man, just because I’m getting married doesn’t mean…), and here was something vital and fresh, something new, the boy was beautiful and he was making himself available (“YOU HAVE A DATE WITH THE GREEK GODS”), asking him what are you doing now, can we talk? He saw himself turn from the precipice, away from danger and possible death, but the boy’s face held other dangers, other uncertainties, other mysteries, while in a deep, reassuring voice he was saying don’t be afraid, come closer…
“I won’t hurt you. I don’t bite. I just wanted to talk, or at least say thanks for sharing in the theater. I enjoyed it a lot, and I thought maybe we could—”
“What did you say your name was?” He remembered full well the boy’s name—Curt—but he wanted an excuse to introduce himself properly.
They exchanged names and shook hands. Curt pulled Frederick out of the way of the other theatergoers, beneath the shelter of an awning over an empty storefront next to the Sit ’n’ Snack. “I’d like to see you again.”
“That…” Frederick cleared his throat. “…should be possible.”
Curt giggled, repeating Frederick’s words, including his cough, and imitating his cautious intonation as if it were the cutest thing he’d ever heard, then said, “Good!”
Frederick grew tight-lipped. But the more he held back, the more intrigued he became. This boy knew his business. Knew how to handle himself. No doubt had done this kind of thing before. Frederick wanted, above all, to know how old he was, but to ask the question would introduce a note of defilement, as if he were a customer and the boy a prostitute (then the ugly thought occurred to him, what if he is a prostitute?).
Curt laughed at Frederick’s second show of reticence, as if he were dealing with a mental incompetent.
“So? What do you wanna do?”
“I’m not free tonight, and I leave town tomorrow,” Frederick said, thinking it was just as well he’d be away in Pennsylvania for the next seventy-two hours.
“When do you get back?”
“Saturday, but I’m not—”
“What about Sunday? I’m going to the beach, wanna join?” The beach felt like a trap. Not the sort of place one could leave easily if one had to. “Or afterward. How about eight or nine o’clock?”
Feeling he couldn’t stall any longer, Frederick agreed. “I think I should call you to confirm in the early evening.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. I don’t have a phone number, and I don’t know if I’ll be anywhere near a phone on Sunday.”
“Aren’t you coming home after the beach?” But he wished he hadn’t asked, for he sounded like a domineering parent.
“No,” Curt said with a wink and asked, instead, for Frederick’s phone number.
Now was the moment of decision. Tearing off the back page of his Playbill—an ad for Chesterfield Kings showing a man (another Jon lookalike) and a woman, each holding a lit cigarette, facing each other across the open hood of an automobile, smiling—he pulled a pen from his breast pocket and wrote his phone number in the air over the smoking couple’s heads. He proposed they meet under the arch at Washington Square, say around 8:30. He jotted that down too, folded the page in quarters and handed it to Curt.
“The arch at Washington Square, say around 8:30.” Curt again imitated Frederick’s exact words and intonation, this time with an adorable smile.
Frederick warily held out his hand.
Curt just looked him in the eye, ignoring the proffered hand. “I think I want to kiss you goodbye, Frederick,” he said, and before Frederick could protest or make a move, Curt grabbed his shoulders and pressed his lips hard against Frederick’s. He then turned and walked down Broadway towards the pulsing lights of Times Square. Frederick walked hastily in the other direction, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, fearing a hundred New Yorkers had just seen two men kiss. At the intersection, however, he looked back, hoping to see Curt still walking towards the square. But he was gone.<
br />
Frederick felt as if he’d just been rejected.
CHAPTER TWO
Frederick checked his watch (plenty of time before his five o’clock train) as he rode the elevator to the fifth floor men’s department at Gimbels. Of course I won’t meet him on Sunday, he said to himself, astonished he’d even considered it for a minute. He’d gone straight home from the theater last night and taken a shower as if to wash himself of the dirty escapade with Curt, then lay awake in bed until 2:00 AM replaying the encounter in his mind. How had he succumbed so easily, so quickly to his…? “Charms” was hardly the word. He thought of the young man’s muscular thigh, the firm but gentle touch of his finger, the silky brown hair that brushed across his forehead and down over his ears, the devious but irresistible look in his eyes when he said—No! It was a sordid little game, instigated by a juvenile delinquent for purposes Frederick could only guess. Imagine the nerve, he thought as the elevator doors opened, the audacity, the recklessness (he chewed the flesh around the nail of his right thumb) to kiss me on a crowded street in Times Square.
He took a deep breath. Stacks of folded shirts, racks of suit coats, beds of socks, rows of shoes, trees of hats—how pleasing, he felt, the neatness and order of the cool, clean-smelling store. There was something about the smell, especially, of new men’s clothing that stimulated him. He gazed down upon a table laden with neckties. Blue diamonds, red octagons, purple chevrons, green gazebos, stripes of pink, gold, black, and silver, plaids of brown, mustard, and gray, rainbow spirals and onion domes, dancing locks and keys, cartoon ducks and palm trees, cotton coats of arms, silken branching leaves and flowers, rayon bursts of coconut, lemon, mango. They ravished his senses.
“You know what you’re lookin’ for?” A gangly man with a gap-toothed smile appeared before him.
“A present for my father turning seventy-five. I’m thinking contemporary but not too flashy.” He thought for a second. “Something to remind him…” He meant to say of me. “…of New York.”
“Does age matter? Maybe at seventy-five he’s ready for somethin’ he never tried before, waddaya think?” From the table of neckties, the salesman (Will was the name on his lapel) fished up a specimen half-red, half-blue, with an atomic symbol embroidered in gold. “And see here, if you look close, a purple spiral on top of the atom.”
It wasn’t the tie Frederick would have chosen (“He have a sense of humor?” Will asked), but it appealed to him.
“I’ll take it.”
As Frederick watched him gift-wrap the tie, he felt an upsurge of excitement and hope. His father was always difficult to buy for, and he never seemed to care much for the things Frederick gave him. This time might be different. Just then he spied another customer—or was it another clerk?—sitting on a stool at the end of the counter. He seemed to be observing their interaction, with disapproval or benignity Frederick couldn’t tell. But what was there to be ashamed of? He hadn’t said or done anything inappropriate. Unless it was the timbre of his voice. Frederick had a perpetual fear that he sounded queer. Sometimes he wondered if normal men had a sixth sense about inverts. He looked the gentleman in the eye. Dangerous to do so, but it happened before he realized what he’d done (“Come again,” Will said in a singsong melody, but Frederick only muttered a baritone “yes” so as not to sound too friendly). Unless as sometimes happened, he thought, taking the elevator back down to the street, the look of disapproval he suspected in the other man’s face was in fact a look of camaraderie. Or even desire. Men were inscrutable that way. He remembered Curt’s Mona Lisa smile.
Better to expect nothing, he thought, now on the sidewalk lighting a cigarette, or the worst, and there won’t be any unpleasant surprises.
Thirty-second Street teemed with people spilling into the street against the onrushing traffic. Frederick allowed himself to be pulled along with the crowd. Delivery boys on bicycles, foreign tourists pointing with maps, men toting briefcases, women yanking children by the hand, taxis, buses, cars, trucks, whistles blowing, horns honking, obscenities shouted, all mingled together and permeated the air like the unpleasant smell of urine that met his nostrils the closer he approached Penn Station. The unbroken row of Doric columns across the façade gave it the appearance of a massive stone jail. Or a tomb. The central hexastyle portico barely projected from the line of adjacent columns, reinforcing the station’s overbearing attitude of power and pomposity. Almost to relieve his eye, Frederick looked up at the Statler Hotel—one, two, three, four, he counted the flights as he scaled the building, thinking, as he always did whenever he came to this neighborhood, of Jon—six, seven, eight—of the room they shared that afternoon during the war. Where was he today? If they ever ran into each other, he wondered, scooting around a workman unloading cases of soda pop onto the sidewalk and hearing voices chanting, what would he say? Something about “shame”—“destroy”—the protest!
He stopped and stood like a post on the corner of Thirty-second Street and Seventh Avenue, at the foot of the Statler Hotel directly across from Penn Station, commuters swirling around him, fanning out across the avenue, running against the light. A line of well-dressed protesters walked in a circle beneath the giant pillars. Crossing Seventh Avenue, one, two, three, four, he counted the pillars to calm his nerves—he wasn’t a joiner, didn’t wish to participate in any public protest, didn’t care if Penn Station was torn down—nine, ten, eleven, twelve—some of his colleagues from Emerson, Root were sure to be there, not to mention Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, probably a dozen important people—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two—so many people on the sidewalk in front of the station, it was hard to tell who was part of the picket line and who was just passing by—twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Neatly hand-painted signs bobbed up and down.
ACTION GROUP FOR BETTER ARCHITECTURE IN NEW YORK
PRESERVE OUR HERITAGE
PROGRESS IS QUALITY NOT NOVELTY
DON’T DEMOLISH IT! POLISH IT!
SHAME!
ANGER
Deborah emerged from the picket line.
“You made it!” She wrapped him in an embrace and kissed him, then noticed he was carrying a suitcase and asked where he was going.
“I’ve got a five o’clock train to Philly, I’m—”
“Oh, there’s Seymour!” Having spotted her husband amid the protesters, she pulled him by the elbow down the picket line. “There’s something I want to discuss with you later.”
Seymour waved a hand while shaking a sign that read “BE A PENN PAL.”
“Look what I found!”
“I didn’t know you two were lovers! Fred, half the men at this protest are here because they used to date my wife.”
“I made a few phone calls. Can I help it if I wasn’t born yesterday?”
Tightening her grip on Frederick’s arm, she pulled him into the picket line along with her husband. Commuters swerved around and sometimes pushed right through the line. Most seemed utterly indifferent to the protesters, even as young secretaries with clipboards and middle-aged men in pinstriped suits carrying stacks of flyers buttonholed passersby, trying to convince them to sign a petition or even just pay a minute of attention. This was the last place on earth Frederick wanted to be. He didn’t believe in the cause. Didn’t believe in causes, period. Then he laid eyes on someone he recognized from the firm, talking with another man as he approached. He’d seen the swarthy young man occasionally around the office (the boss’s son?), though they’d never properly met.
Seymour made the introductions: “Alan Emerson, Fred Bailey, I think you two know each other. Jordan Houk, Fred Bailey.”
Deborah embraced and kissed both Alan and Jordan—she seemed on intimate terms with everyone. Jordan immediately informed the group, as if resuming a prior conversation, of his latest efforts as the lawyer for AGBANY to persuade the City Planning Commission to withhold the necessary permit to build the new sports arena on the Penn Station site. “And they said they were indeed
concerned with the adequacy of service rendered to the traveling public, but in the absence of some substantial reduction in service the proposal to demolish the station doesn’t require the Commission’s prior approval.”
Seymour, Alan, and Jordan launched into an animated debate about the meaning of the words “service to the traveling public,” specifically whether aesthetics and the sense of self-worth conferred by a grand port of entry such as Penn Station counted as public service. They ridiculed everyone who disagreed with them—Robert Moses, the Planning Commission, the unions.
“Obviously we need to educate the public on architectural matters,” Deborah said, “but, really, how are we to do that?”
Frederick was struck by her use of the word “we.” Was she so committed to her husband’s work?
“All anyone seems to care about is the columns!” Seymour mentioned a number of proposals for salvaging them—a mall in Battery Park, a classical landscape in Flushing Meadows.
“But there are real reasons,” Deborah said, “why Penn Station is headed for the dustbin. We can’t ignore them.”
This led to a debate about the architect Charles McKim’s intentions, his attitudes toward cities in general (“he hated tall buildings”), the kinship between Penn Station and the great train stations of Europe (“except Penn Station was always redundant because the trains were electric from the start and never needed a lofty train shed”), the question of whether Americans were even capable of appreciating, much less maintaining and preserving, a piece of architecture that makes reference to buildings from other cultures or eras—“and what is ‘modern,’ anyhow?” Jordan asked rhetorically. “Modern doesn’t stay modern forever. Penn Station is total architecture. Not just Greek columns here, Baths of Caracalla there, with a little bit of Brandenburg Gate thrown in for fun.” (For the first time in his life Frederick realized the main entrance to Penn Station made visual reference to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. How could he have failed to see it?) “It makes a single, coherent argument. You move through the neoclassical spaces, you wind up in the modern glass and steel concourse. McKim is actually telling a story about the progress from the old—”
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