Pennsylvania Station

by Patrick E Horrigan

  But there was no time to lose. They had only a couple of hours before Frederick must report to the dock at 42nd Street, so Jon said, “Let’s go!” They pushed their way through the waiting room, raced up the staircase skipping steps, through the arcade, across Seventh Avenue (Jon shouted “Watch out!” as Frederick nearly ran in front of a bus barnstorming down the Avenue), into the Statler Hotel, not blinking an eye as they asked for any room that was available, they were willing to pay extra since check-in wasn’t for several more hours, then up the elevator to the 18th floor, inside the room, kicking the door shut as they kissed and groped and Frederick just managed to set the alarm clock before they tore off their clothes and made love for exactly two hours.

  “Having sex like that in the Statler Hotel was…” Frederick paused to choose his words carefully. “It was unforgettable because…” He fingered the stem of his wine glass. “Because everything we meant to each other was summed up in it. Everything. I can’t even describe it as sex. It was…lovemaking.” He took a sip of wine. “When the alarm rang we jumped out of bed, jumped in the shower, and I fucked him in the shower, and I didn’t care if the chambermaid heard all the noise we made.” He looked at Curt. “We were discharged in December of ’45.”

  Again Curt seemed to be revolving a thought and was on the verge of articulating it when Frederick explained how, during the war, Jon had hinted he might move to New York when it was all over, but when the war ended he returned to his hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts. From then on, he and Frederick made frequent visits back and forth between Boston and New York. At first, Frederick enjoyed his visits to Boston. They spent weekends wandering Beacon Hill and walking along the Charles River. But instead of getting closer, they seemed to settle, little by little, into what Frederick came to feel was an unfair arrangement. Jon continued dating Cathy yet never made clear, either to Cathy or to Frederick, whether he intended to marry her (during the war Jon would show Frederick his letters before sending them off—lines like “I am so full of love” made them laugh because they were really about Frederick, but she’d never know—and yet, Jon said, he wasn’t exactly lying to her either). Five years went by and still no commitment from Jon. Cathy grew tired of waiting and left Boston for the west coast. It was at this point that Frederick tried to pressure Jon to make a decision—come to New York, or Frederick would move to Boston. But by this time Jon felt no need for a change. They had the best of both worlds, he kept saying—the days apart made weekends and holidays together mean so much more. Besides, everyone knew Jon as “Freddy’s friend”—why raise eyebrows by setting up house together? Frederick wasn’t sure but Jon might be right. Still, he persisted in the hope that one day they would live together. Become a real couple. So he waited, hoping there would be a change of heart. A few years later, Frederick wasn’t sure exactly when, Jon began seeing Rachel, an old acquaintance and friend of the family. He also began having occasional romantic trysts with an old school chum, Philip, who’d always seemed content to play second fiddle in Jon’s life. And he continued seeing Frederick on weekends and sometimes for week-long vacations. He found a secretarial job in a law firm but didn’t much care for the work. It was as if he was biding his time until the right person came along, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, “made him a wealthy woman,” as he sometimes joked. Frederick hated sharing him but had long accepted the fact that Jon could not be forced to change. It would have to come from Jon, at his own pace, in his own way, or not at all.

  Their twisted, frustrating, long-distance affair went on like this for several more years, until Christmas of 1959. They’d made plans to spend the holiday together in New York, but at the last minute something came up—some family emergency, was how Jon put it—and Frederick ended up going to Reading instead. The call came Christmas Eve. “Freddy, it’s for you,” his mother said. It was Jon, phoning to tell him the “good news.” He and Rachel were engaged. It was Rachel who’d proposed. He wanted Frederick to be his best man. He said this didn’t mean anything had to change between them, he would always have special feelings for Frederick. In some way, Frederick would always be “the one.”

  Curt was stone silent. Frederick thought he detected tears in his eyes. Or was it the reflection of lights from the canal? He refilled their glasses. He didn’t ask if he should continue.

  When he put down the phone, he was in shock but couldn’t let it show. He said, Excuse me, went upstairs to his old room, and shut the door. He sat on the edge of the bed and began to cough, a dry, aching, hacking, choking cough. And then the tears came. He cried, and the more he cried the more fierce his sobbing became. Then he grew angry and put his face to the pillow and screamed. He pounded the bed, then slapped his thighs, his arms, and when that wasn’t enough—when the pain didn’t sting enough—he slapped his own face. He cried and raged so long and so hard he was out of breath. At length he grew calm, composed himself, and came downstairs again, trying to act as if nothing had happened. But he was all nerves. He went out for a walk Christmas morning. He crossed paths with a couple he knew from the neighborhood. He struggled to be cordial. They could tell something was wrong—everyone knew something had happened—but what could they do or say? Some things you just don’t talk about.

  He dated other men after Jon, but it never went beyond a few outings. One or both of them sooner or later lost interest, and usually it was sooner than later. Gradually he only wanted brief, impersonal, sexual encounters. These became his steady diet. Until he met Curt.

  “So you really were in love with him,” Curt said, but Frederick didn’t seem to hear the tone of resignation in his voice.

  “Yes,” he replied simply.

  Curt lay awake that night, hearing the lapping water of the canal and the occasional boat going by in the dark. He thought of the picture of Frederick and Jonathan during the war. Of the way Frederick had spoken about Jon. He needed to find somebody who would speak about him like that one day. Someone to whom he would be everything. For all his ability to wrap Frederick around his little finger, he realized there was something about him he would never be able to touch. Never lay claim to. He got out of bed and reached for his pants. Again he felt the crinkle of the piece of paper in the pocket (Tomorrow, he decided, the first thing I’m gonna do is pay this guy a visit). He slipped out of the room, left the hotel, and walked all the way to St. Mark’s Square.

  The vastness of the empty square at night—no café orchestras, hardly a person in sight, even the pigeons were gone—opened up before him. He peered in the dark at the arches and mosaics, the domes and flagpoles of St. Mark’s Basilica. Frederick was so in love with old buildings. And old boyfriends. If he couldn’t get what he wanted from Frederick, he’d have to look elsewhere. It wouldn’t be the first time in his life he was driven to that. He was a cat with nine lives. He liked Frederick—maybe even loved him (who the hell knows what love is anyway?). But he was still a young man. He had his whole life ahead of him. No way was he ready to settle down. He would never want the kind of life Frederick described with Jon. He had too much living to do, places to see, people to meet, worlds to change.

  He walked back to the hotel feeling something had changed in him. Tomorrow, he promised himself, and thought of Scarlett O’Hara lying across the red-carpeted stairs at the end of Gone with the Wind proclaiming, “Tomorrow is another day.” “Silly queen,” he said to himself, “I hope Paolo is good looking.”

  After breakfast the next morning, he mentioned casually that Angelo had given him the name of a friend and he thought he’d look him up. To Curt’s surprise, Frederick said he’d like to go with him. The address was near their hotel in the Dorsoduro district, across the canal from the ramshackle Squero di San Trovaso, the gondola construction and repair yard. The number was painted on a metal garage door, seemingly the only modern feature in the entire row of buildings fronting the canal. Upon pushing a buzzer next to it, they stood back as the metal door was pulled up to reveal a short, bearded, rather burly man, so
mewhere between Curt’s age and Frederick’s—it was hard to tell—and, behind him, an enormous painting of Angelo in the nude. To be greeted with what was unmistakably Angelo’s face, and the body neither of them had seen but had, each in his privacy, speculated about, aroused Curt and made Frederick uncomfortable—he felt instantly revealed as a homosexual, standing there next to Curt, before Paolo and the painting of Angelo. Paolo, Curt dimly felt, might yet be a conduit to Angelo.

  They introduced themselves as friends of Angelo’s. Paolo welcomed them in and led them up a flight of stairs to a large, glass-roofed studio. Paintings mostly of nudes, male and female, covered the walls and leaned against every available surface. Their talk initially revolved around Angelo—how they’d met, what was he doing now—does he still work in the hotel restaurant? Does he still drive that broken little Cinquecento?

  “The green Fiat?” Frederick said, “Yes.”

  Curt was bowled over by the larger-than-life-size nudes on display. Paolo’s hard-edged, almost cartoonish style emphasized the extreme physical power and beauty of his subjects, especially the men.

  “Excuse my asking, but…” (looking at Curt) “…did Angelo give you my name as a recommendation for subject?”

  There was no way of saying no. The question already implied an interest.

  “I’ve never been painted by a real artist,” Curt said but then recalled Frederick’s innumerable sketches of him, including the one of him in the nude in the hotel room in Rome. He felt a quick thrill at the thought, just then, of wounding Frederick and knowing he was in no position to object.

  Paolo showed them his work. Each painting was the occasion for a story about the sitter—his name, age, place of origin, occupation, but also things less tangible—a charming habit, a vocal eccentricity, an aura—none of which, Frederick noted critically, had any traceable connection to what dominated the canvas—feet, calves, buttocks, thighs, penis, abdomen, navel, nipples, shoulders, underarm hair. Paolo then led them into the garden out back. He served coffee. His English was stilted and polite. He asked their plans while in Venice, what they’d seen so far, whether they’d been to the Lido (“beautiful people there, you will see”), and recommended a few restaurants, churches, and shops near their hotel.

  “Completely vulgar,” Frederick said of Paolo’s work once they’d left the studio.

  “I didn’t think so at all.”

  Frederick queried him as to what he liked about it, what he thought good about it. Curt knew he couldn’t converse about art on Frederick’s terms, so he merely said he didn’t know—all he knew was, he liked it.

  “You hear that so often. ‘I don’t know anything about art, I just know what I like.’”

  “Are you insulting my intelligence?”

  Frederick felt chastened. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… He made me uncomfortable, that’s all.”

  “Well, don’t worry, you won’t be posing for him.”

  Frederick let it drop and hoped Curt would do the same. They’d paid their visit, sent good wishes from Angelo in Rome, done their friendly duty, and that was all. But Curt was hugely flattered by Paolo’s interest in him and announced to Frederick the next morning he was spending the day at Paolo’s studio.

  “Why?” he asked before he’d had time to think about how best to handle the situation.

  “He wants to paint me.”

  “Did he say so?”

  “Even if it wasn’t explicit, who says I can’t offer my services to him?”

  Frederick laughed. “What services do you have in mind?”

  “Whatever he wants, you have a problem with that?”

  “He’s a pornographer!”

  “So what? It could be fun. Angelo wanted me to meet him, he obviously wants to paint me, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t.”

  Frederick didn’t press the issue any further. He only asked when they might rendezvous later.

  “I have no idea how long these things take.”

  “You expect to spend the entire day and evening with him?” As he said it, he feared he’d planted the idea in Curt’s mind.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “So you’re prepared to separate for the rest of the day.”

  “I’m just gonna see what happens.”

  “If I don’t see you by 7:00 PM, should I assume you’ll be having dinner elsewhere?”

  “Yes. You should assume that.”

  It was one thing, Frederick realized, to feel that love had been lost between them, but to feel Curt no longer needed him… He began picking at the cuticle on his thumb. “Very well,” he said with resignation. “Are you planning on having breakfast before you go?”

  “I’m not very hungry.”

  Clearly he wanted to be left to his own devices. “Make sure you have your key.”

  “Frederick, I’m fine,” he said with exasperation and reached out to embrace him. Frederick flinched. “All right, if you don’t want to touch me. Have a nice day.”

  As Curt turned to leave, Frederick reminded him they were scheduled to go to Munich on Thursday. This made Curt angry. “Do you really think I’m just gonna ditch you for the rest of our vacation?” he asked and left without waiting for a reply.

  Frederick spent the morning at the Accademia Gallery. He found a café at lunchtime and, afterward, made the rounds of some churches by Palladio he’d wanted a closer look at. He thought an excursion to Palladio’s La Rotonda outside Vincenza might be a pleasant way to spend tomorrow. But mostly he was just worried about getting through the next forty-eight hours. He had an uneasy feeling about the way he and Curt had parted.

  Not only did Curt not return to the hotel by 7:00 PM but he didn’t come back to the hotel at all that night. On Wednesday morning Frederick took a gondola to the mainland and boarded a bus to Vincenza. All his professional life he’d wanted to see the mansions of the Renaissance master architect whose name was a byword for beauty and elegance of proportion. La Rotonda in particular interested him as one of the buildings that inspired Jefferson’s Monticello. But he was distracted with thoughts of Curt. As he approached the small villa, its isolation amid sweeping lawns making itself more keenly felt with every step, Frederick thought Palladio’s austere design—the perfect symmetry of pediments and columns, stairs and statues—almost barbaric in its simplicity, crude in its directness. No one, he felt, could live in a country house so rigidly perfect as this. And he only became more morose as the day wore on. What could have happened? Was Curt having an affair with Paolo? Was he punishing him for something he’d said, something he’d done?

  He ate alone in the hotel room that night. Packing his bags for the next day’s trip to Munich, he felt as miserable as he’d ever felt. He knew if anything he should be worried on Curt’s behalf, but self-concern trumped all other feelings. It was like their first date all over again. He was being stood up, and he could hardly believe Curt still had the nerve to do it. The same old game of cat and mouse. Making up only to break apart. The same old conflicts, the same old arguments, over and over.

  Frederick returned to the room after breakfast the next morning to find Curt soaking in the tub. He said nothing but waited for him to emerge. He was determined to avoid an argument. They greeted each other casually as if nothing had happened, Curt especially playing it cool as he emerged from the bathroom, wrapping a towel around his waist. Frederick thought his golden torso looked particularly beautiful still dripping from the bath. Curt inquired about checkout time and, saying nothing else, proceeded to gather his things. Frederick sat at the table by the window and lit a cigarette. He watched and waited for an explanation.

  Once his suitcase was packed, Curt, still dressed only in his bath towel, sat at the table opposite Frederick—“may I?”—and lit a cigarette for himself. “I’m not going to Munich.” Frederick looked at him in disbelief. “Paolo asked me to stay on in Venice. I’d like to spend more time here, not live so much like a tourist. I can stay with him and it won’t cost anythin
g. I just need some spending money to get me through until the eighteenth.”

  Frederick waited several beats before speaking. “You’re leaving me for the rest of the trip?”

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you and I didn’t know when was the right time.” Frederick saw his mother approaching him, telephone receiver in her hand, snow falling outside the dining room window. Freddy, it’s for you. “I need to be free. Make my own decisions. Sometimes I feel you own me. Like I’m dependent on you for everything. That’s not good for me and it’s not good for you.”

  “Please don’t tell me what’s good or not good for me.” He picked at the cuticle on his thumb.

  “I need some time to myself. I’m sorry this had to happen here. You have your work and I know that will occupy you in Munich.”

  Again Frederick asked him to stop making suppositions about him.

  “I’d like my plane ticket and some money. I’ll meet you in Rome next weekend.”