Frederick wanted to make up for everything Curt was missing in his life. “Do you like Walt Whitman?”
“I don’t know, he’s…who is he?”
“An American poet.”
“Yeah, I think we had to read him in school, but I never did the reading.”
Frederick opened the volume to the Calamus poems. He read how the poet’s name was celebrated in the city, but it wasn’t a happy night, I caroused and laughed but was unhappy inside, until I left the city and came to the shore and wandered alone over the beach, undressing, laughing in the cool waters, and saw the sun rise, and thought with joy how my dear friend, my lover, was on his way to see me, and each breath tasted sweeter, all the day my food nourished me, and then at evening came my friend, and that night while all was still I heard the waters roll continually up the shores, whispering to congratulate me, for the one I love lay sleeping by me under cover in the cool night, in the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me, and his arm lay lightly around my breast.
“And that night I was happy.”
“Did you make that up?”
“No, that was Whitman. 1860.”
“Wow, that’s… I can’t believe a man wrote that in the 1800s. They sure didn’t teach us that in school.”
“Incredible, but it’s true. I get a lot of pleasure from Whitman. A lot of comfort.”
“Read me another.”
Frederick read poem after poem, of two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving, elbows stretching, fingers clutching, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving; of two men in a barroom, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word; of other men in other lands yearning, thoughtful, how we should be brethren and lovers if only we could know each other; how I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. (Curt’s eyelids were closing and opening. Frederick stroked his head.) If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, but I shall be good health to you nevertheless.
He read of the person drawn toward me, of the warning, be careful, I am surely far different from what you suppose. Do you think you will find in me your ideal? Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? Have you no thought O dreamer that I may be all maya, illusion?
And he read of two simple men on a pier in the midst of a crowd, saying goodbye to each other, how the one to remain hung on the other’s neck and passionately kissed him, how the other pressed him to remain in his arms.
Curt was asleep, his breathing steady. Frederick looked at the young man in his lap and petted his hair and bent to kiss his cheek. He hadn’t felt this tenderness toward another person in such a long time. Not since Jon. He gave no thought to the possibility it may be all maya, illusion.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Frederick’s trip to Reading in April was different from his visit the previous summer. If in August he’d felt his usual ambivalence about family gatherings, plus sheer impatience to get back to New York to meet Curt, now the following spring when Marge had her baby (it was a girl, she named it Clare, after their mother) he felt separate from his family for another reason. Now he was insulated by love. Love was a narcotic, and he was heavily under the influence. He felt no wish to tell anyone, share anything about the change that had occurred in his life (not that he ever could, of course), but the change was real and he knew it. He arrived on Good Friday, the day Marge went into labor. Her friend Dorothy waited for her at the hospital while Frederick took his parents to church. Even the gloomy Good Friday service, with its self-hating Reproaches and histrionic veneration of the cross, couldn’t darken his mood. Instead he let his eyes lovingly trace the eccentric Moorish molding above the gothic windows, and he lost himself in strangely blissful contemplation of the circular window above the high altar, a stained-glass copy of Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat. He marveled, even in this second-hand version, at the delicacy of Mary’s hand as she dipped her quill into the inkwell proffered by one of the gaggle of boy angels surrounding her, as the Christ child’s plump hand straddled his mother’s forearm and the page of the book in which she composed her canticle (Magnificat anima mea Dominum, My soul doth magnify the Lord).
Everything he did—the visit to the hospital to see Marge and the new baby, making dinner for his parents and Markie, attending Mass on Easter Sunday morning, visiting the aunts in the afternoon, and then taking the train back to New York Sunday night—happened as if behind bullet-proof glass. Nothing anyone said or failed to say could touch him, for he carried something inside him (the thought amused and appalled him) almost as if he were pregnant (My soul doth magnify the Lord because He that is mighty hath done great things to me). Even Marge’s newly straitened circumstances—Chuck was gone and she would have to start earning money once she was on her feet—didn’t faze him. Because of her condition he had less opportunity to speak to her than to anyone that weekend. Dorothy filled him in on the details of where things stood with Chuck (her biggest fear wasn’t that Marge was now alone but that she might take him back after what he’d done to her), Marge and the baby slept most of the weekend, and since it was a cesarean section she would have to stay in the hospital longer than expected. Dot could look after Markie, and one of the Galen kids, Ann or Joan, could help out if Mama and Pop needed anything in an emergency. So he returned to New York in good conscience: everything was more or less under control, and he’d been there when Marge needed him. Best of all, there’d been no opportunity for Marge to pursue her line of questioning about a “special someone” in his life.
Meanwhile, the basic facts of his relationship with Curt had not changed. Curt continued to live with Collin. They had not clearly broken up. Frederick had no way of contacting him. They did, however, see each other more regularly now, two or three times a week. Curt made the phone call when Collin wasn’t around, they arranged to meet at Frederick’s apartment, and though Curt was chronically late (one night Frederick prepared Curt’s favorite dish—veal parmesan—but by the time he arrived the food was cold; another night they were supposed to meet for a performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but Curt was late and wasn’t admitted until twenty minutes into the first act; still another night Frederick had long abandoned hope of his arrival and gone to bed, only to be awoken by the sound of the front door opening—Curt now had his own key—and then the smell of alcohol and cigarettes as he stumbled into bed)—on all such occasions, Frederick forgave. He found within himself surprising reserves of patience. Things important to him now took their place a notch lower in the scale of what he cared most about. Really, he cared about one thing only—one person—and that was Curt. For it was apparent that Curt needed him. Frederick didn’t mind that Curt, as so often seemed the case, phoned him when there’d been a fight with Collin. Sometimes he would arrive past midnight, stand at the door with his arms held out for an embrace, and fall sobbing into Frederick’s arms. Frederick would lead him to the couch, and they would sit and talk about what had happened—often it was Collin threatening to kick him out, and then where would he go, he had almost no money. He never went so far as to outright ask Frederick if he could move in with him, though Frederick figured it would come to that before summer was out. He did a lot of listening when Curt was like this. He didn’t feel jealous, or hardly at all, because he knew at the end of the crying jag, Curt would dry his tears, and then change the subject, start laughing and teasing, and pretty soon teasing would turn to lovemaking.
One night toward the end of April Frederick couldn’t resist asking Curt the question that increasingly hovered over all their interactions, both sexual and non-sexual. “Are you in love with Collin?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I think so. But I love you too.”
The words “I love you” had not yet been spoken
either by Curt or Frederick, and in a sense they still hadn’t been spoken, for this was something less than a full-throated declaration. Nonetheless Frederick received Curt’s statement with calculated benignity. He hardly raised an eyebrow, as if to do so would frighten the timid creature back into its cave.
“What do you want from him?”
“To leave me alone, or…” It was rather difficult to understand what Curt now tried putting into words—something to do with Collin loving him like he used to—loving him fully—which somehow didn’t, to his mind, preclude being with Frederick, and then the issue slid almost imperceptibly from fidelity (or monogamy or the opposite of monogamy, it was hard to tell which) to physical appearances. It didn’t matter, he started to say, if Collin was younger than Frederick and good looking—“You’re good looking too, that’s not what I’m saying—I mean—what I really want is to not be like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like this: I just come to your apartment, we talk a little, we eat, we have sex, I leave, then we don’t talk for a couple of days, then I call and we meet and we have sex and we eat…” Frederick was puzzled, for the arrangement had seemed until now to suit Curt perfectly, and hard as it was to admit, it had always seemed that Curt didn’t much care what toll it took on Frederick. “It’s not that I wish things were different between us. It’s not about us. It’s about me. I want me to be different. I want to be a different person. Sometimes I hate myself. The way I am.”
Frederick was bewildered. He asked him what he hated about himself.
“I don’t do anything important. Look at you, you’re an architect. You’ve made a career for yourself. You can walk through the city and say, I built that, I designed that. A building is real. What have I done? I ran away from home and worked in a restaurant and now I’m a grocery clerk and it’s all shit. My life is shit.”
Frederick was disturbed to hear Curt had such a low opinion of himself, but even more disturbing was the suggestion that he, Frederick, seemed to make so little difference in his life. Curt’s very presence in his life had put an extra layer of protection between him and the world, but Curt had seemed to grow more vulnerable, more depressed, more angry since the day they met. But what inspired his anger seemed to change from day to day. Sometimes it was Collin, other times his job. Then it was his mother, who rarely called or wrote or came to see him and never asked him to visit her in Chicago—for she knew Curt and his stepfather couldn’t be in the same room together. Or his father, whom he never heard from but once a year, and then it was just a Hallmark card on his birthday. “At least he remembers my birthday, piece of shit.”
Sometimes it was politics. By early May, the news from Birmingham, Alabama, was all he could talk about. He was exhilarated when the television news showed scenes of police using attack dogs and fire hoses turned on full strength to repel the Negro student protesters. He was especially excited, he said, by the fact that the protesters were students, and he noted their seeming hilarity at times, until things turned violent.
“They have nothing to lose and they’re putting their whole lives on the line for what they believe in, for what’s right,” Curt said.
To Frederick, the turmoil was horrifying but remote. He thanked God he lived in New York and not the south. When he read in the Times that the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality had sent a telegram to President Kennedy urging Federal action to restore civil rights in Alabama, adding that “Alabama now rivals the racist police state of South Africa,” Frederick was glad to be an architect, glad to be an artist, to be doing something that made a contribution to society that would outlast this hideous civil war overtaking the nation.
“It makes me want to throw bricks at the cops, motherfuckers!” Curt said.
Startled, Frederick put down the newspaper. “Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right. What kind of country do we live in?” He reminded Frederick of the incident last summer at Riis Park, of being beaten and thrown in jail. “What happened to me was—is like—it’s like what’s happening to the Negroes in Alabama!” The comparison struck Frederick as grotesque.
“That was an isolated incident. It was terrible, what happened to you, but this involves thousands of people. Whole sectors of society are marshaled against Negroes. This isn’t a question of what they can wear in public, it’s about being prevented from using public restrooms, pools, theaters” (he ticked off the items on his fingers), “department store dressing rooms, libraries, motels.”
The clarity and vehemence of Frederick’s argument made Curt furious.
“Whose side are you on?”
Frederick frowned. “I’m not on any side. There are no sides. I’m saying these are two unrelated situations.”
“I disagree.”
“I don’t think we have the right to just…” He wanted to say something about homosexuals behaving any way they liked in public. An image of Curt kissing him on Broadway the night they met flashed in his head.
“The right to just what?”
“I don’t want to get into an argument with you about this. We’re not talking about homosexuals. We’re talking about Negroes. And we’re agreed what’s happening in Alabama is terrible, okay?”
Curt wasn’t mollified, but he didn’t pursue the issue any further for the time being. But neither did he forget the argument in the days to come, and when an open letter by Martin Luther King, Jr. written from the Birmingham city jail was published two weeks later in the New York Post, Curt brought up the subject again. He trailed Frederick around the apartment as Frederick got ready for work.
“Listen to this: ‘One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”’”
“And I would say the kind of law St. Augustine had in mind was not a law prohibiting men from flaunting their bikini bathing suits on the coast of Carthage.”
Curt read on, ignoring Frederick’s sarcasm. “‘To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.’”
“You’re saying the law you broke is an unjust law that means to distort your soul and damage your personality? That wearing your bikini on the boardwalk is an expression of your personality, of your very soul?”
“Why are you such a bitch about this?”
“Because I think you can’t compare the two things. You can’t compare the treatment of Negroes in society and the treatment of homosexuals in society.”
“Why not?”
A thought crossed Frederick’s mind quicker than lightning: homosexuals don’t demonstrate, they don’t scream and cry out about injustice, they keep it to themselves, they are finer than Negroes. But what he said was, “Martin Luther King is talking about the morality of law. Nothing homosexuals do as homosexuals is considered moral under any jurisdiction, in any religious framework. It’s completely outside the pale, and no interpretation of religion, no twisting of the law can save you from that fact. You want to talk about natural law? My God, what homosexuals do goes against nature in every sense of the word!”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this.”
“All I’m saying is, the idea of civil rights doesn’t make any sense when applied to homosexuals. You can’t have a bill of homosexual civil rights.”
Curt refused to drop the issue. “Listen to this: ‘I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the white citizen’s councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate’” (stabbing the newspaper over the words “white moderate,” he now followed Frederick into the bathroom, continuing to read aloud) “‘who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is th
e absence of tension’” (“Excuse me” Frederick had to interrupt—Curt was standing in his way at the sink) “‘to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action—”’”
“You think I’m the real enemy?”
“I completely understand what King is saying.”
“So do I, and it has nothing to do with us.” But Frederick saw the need to change his tack (if only because he was late for work). He was usually ready to concede anything to Curt. This was the odd exception, but he was afraid it could turn into something bigger, more divisive (politics had a way of doing that—he’d seen it happen between himself and his own father, first over the New Deal, then the House Un-American Activities Committee, now President Kennedy). “I hate to think of what happened to you that day,” he said taking Curt in his arms, “I wish I could have saved you from that.”
“How could you have saved me?”
He wanted to say, I would have insisted you put your towel on, but he knew that would only antagonize him. “I would have said, ‘He’s my son, and we had no idea about the ordinance. It won’t happen again.’”
“So you would have lied and capitulated to the cops.”
“I would have protected you and prevented you from getting into an argument with someone bigger and stronger than you. Yes, I would have capitulated. I don’t think a law like that is worth laying down your life for, but you are worth laying down my life for.” He felt butterflies in his stomach. He couldn’t unsay it and didn’t want to.
“You’re saying you’d die for me?”
“Let’s not scare ourselves with wild what-if stories. I love you.” Now he’d said it, and without qualification. “Do you know that?”
“I guess I do now,” still with a trace of anger in his voice.
“I love you and I want you to be happy and safe.” He kissed him on the forehead.
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