“A few years,” said Andy, who had retrieved two steaming mugs from the kitchen. He’d stayed in Bellerose for a little while after he resigned from the force, right after he heard that the singer had died. His experimental undercover program had been discontinued — inconclusive data was the conclusion — and he couldn’t bear the idea of going back in the squad car.
When Andy told his parents over the phone that he was leaving the force, his father said, “Son, I think you have a problem with completion.” His mother just sounded relieved. “I read that the library is hiring,” she said.
He lived off his savings for a while, then, when his father died a few years later, a decent-size trust fund, which paid his basic expenses and allowed him to volunteer at the Gay and Lesbian Center in the Village, where he manned the hotline in the late hours, talking to men worried about the disease, about coming out, about finding safe space. And he often thought about the singer, the one he might have seen, when he didn’t kick himself for not finding her, or at the very least despair over the fact that she didn’t get to have one more moment in the sun. There was always something there to remind him: a new pair of sneakers, a baseball cap, a percussive bounce in someone’s step. The lemon wedge on his teacup. He still went to record stores and made sure her albums were stocked prominently, called oldies radio stations and requested her songs, wrote to music magazines and suggested articles about her. The one thing he didn’t do that often was actually listen to her records. Hearing her voice only collapsed the space between Andy and the loss of her. It was coming up on seven years now.
When the conversation with Sean stalled, Andy moved over toward the fireplace, next to the stereo equipment, the same good components his parents had given him years ago, only now with a CD player add-on. There was a single cube on the floor filled with about 30 albums; he was still selective about the music he would actually buy. He pulled out one of his few recent purchases, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, which proved to him yet again that you could have good songcraft with modern production, and that a smallish voice with attitude and heart could carry farther than a barnyard bellow.
“Wait, wait!” Sean said, suddenly behind Andy and reaching into the cube. Andy jumped back, cop reflex, space expansion. Sean pulled out a few of the singer’s albums. “I can’t believe you have these,” Sean said, fingering and flipping over the covers of, first, the silver-and-blue album and, then, the tan.
Another come-lately fan, Andy suspected. In the past couple of years, there had been that movie about her with the dolls, and a TV biopic, and singers like Madonna and Chrissie Hynde professing their admiration for her. It was almost as if her disease had given her some street cred, turned her into an ironic icon. Andy felt some validation for her, and even a little for himself, but mostly he couldn’t help wondering where all this love was when she was dying.
Andy reached for the silver-and-blue album, which had those first two big hits, figuring that’s what Sean would want him to play. “No, no, I need to hear something else,” Sean said, and stuck his hand back into the cube, pulling out the singer and the brother’s “progressive” album. “Side 2, Track 1.”
Andy looked at the titles on the cover. Sean had asked to hear her country hit from later in the career. Not one of Andy’s favorites — it was from her lighter period — but what the heck. He put the record on, turned around and saw that Sean had stripped down to his thermal T-shirt, boxer briefs and socks, and when the song began he started pinging around Andy’s living room like a pinball. Andy’s unease with Sean, and with the song, dissipated as Sean, twirling and pogo-ing around his living room, got lighter himself, having shed not just some clothes but the heaviness, the heartache of his day, the agony of life during the plague. And for the first time Andy noticed that the singer actually sounded happy in this song, unlike most of her others. Sean was soaking up her joy and spraying it back across Andy’s living room. Somehow the record didn’t skip.
When the song was over, Sean spread the albums on the floor and said, “Play this cut, then this one, then this one.” So maybe this guy wasn’t just a fly-by-night fan, Andy thought. Andy just started the silver-and-blue album from the beginning, and they sat back on the couch. Suddenly Sean was pouring out details of his life: He was half Puerto Rican and half Irish, he worked in fashion — that would account for the designer glasses and the quirky shirt and the hint of snark — and lived just outside the city with a younger sister, whose two young children he was helping to raise. In the past 10 years, he’d buried more than three dozen friends, but had so far escaped the disease himself. “Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier to just get it and be done with it,” Sean said.
Andy snapped to, upright now on the couch, boring into Sean’s eyes with the same look of disapprobation and concern that he’d give someone he’d pulled over. “Please, please don’t,” he said. Please live. Sean looked right back at Andy for the first time all night. “You’re handsomer than I remember,” Sean said. “Of course it was hard to tell in all that steam.”
Sean reached for Andy’s hand, then moved in for a kiss. Of the few men Andy had dated over the years, he’d never really found a good kisser, one whose lips just matched his, weren’t too dry or too moist, didn’t freeze up or engulf or slide around or slam on the brakes, but interlocked like moving puzzle pieces. Sean’s, though, were a perfect fit. He still might be a psycho, but Andy had the hot tea next to him just in case. And the gun wasn’t far.
Andy offered a few details of his own life. “An ex-cop who thought about the priesthood?” Sean said. “Got a thing for uniforms?”
After a few more songs and some heavier petting, they moved into the bedroom, and as their T-shirts and socks were hitting the floor, the medley of songs by the famous ’60s songwriters came on.
“You know, the thing about this medley,” Andy said, in anticipation of the zippy, stitched-together snippets of hits, “is that it starts in the heavens, and then — ”
“I know, I know,” Sean said. “The slathered harmonies, that loungy piano solo, the brother’s voice . . . . Pretty goofy. But still somehow charming. And isn’t she just — ’’ Sean popped up from his pillow — “spuh-len-did all the way? That warmth, that quiet control, that impeccable rhythm. . . . ”
***
At 10 o’clock the next morning, they were still in bed. Andy had been dozing on and off until he was awakened for good by the bells from St. Peter’s on 20th Street, a smidge out of tune but still one of the things he liked best about Sunday mornings in Chelsea, reminding him, as they often did, of that one blissful Saturday morning in the seminary. He really ought to get up, he thought.
Sean, who was still sleeping, would probably be gone soon, and if things went the way they usually did, he wouldn’t be back. They’d had a memorable night, but she had been the conduit — her voice lingered in the morning-after air like the smell of sex and toothpaste, lingered just as it did that day years ago in the record-store booth — but how many more times could that happen? Sean might have just needed a shoulder and a warm bed, a warm voice, after a rough night in the AIDS ward. Andy thought about how he never even knew the name of that boy in the booth. Be safe, wherever you are, he thought.
Andy leaned toward the edge of the mattress, and his legs started to swing toward the floor. Just then Sean, still on his side facing away from Andy, reached behind and pulled him back into the bed, cradling Andy’s right arm against his chest.
“Where are you going, Andy?” Sean said. “Get closer. Close to me.”
And so Andy did.
Acknowledgments
With gratitude, for their eyes and ears, time and talents, across the decades:
Frances Scully Abbott, Herb Alpert, Mark Ansell, Eileen Ben- jamin, Paul Bresnick, Colin Bridgham, Marie Scully Browne, Ted Casselman, Tom DeBona, Gladys Eldred, Wm. Ferguson, Frenda Franklin, Ben Grandgenett, Paul Grein, Michael Hanrahan, Gerald Hoerburger, Mary Hoerburger, Peggy Hoerburger, Virginia Scully Hoerburge
r, Bill Holland, Marjorie Holt, Russell Javors, Bill Kelley, Jon Konjoyan, Robert LaForce, Kyle Ligman, Robert Liguori, Linda F. Magyar, Arthur McCune, Michele McKenna, Tausif Noor, Derek Petti, Karen Ichiuji Ramone, Phil Ramone, Aaron Retica, Joe Rucci, Daniel Rushefsky, Christopher Schelling, Randy L. Schmidt, David Scott, Alice Scully, Jane St. John, Adam Sternbergh, Doug Stewart, Andy Waldron, Carolyn Waldron, Rachel Willey, Alex Witchel.
Why Do Birds Page 23