by Tabitha King
Even as she does, the man moves out of hiding, and nudges her aside.
"Let 'em in," he says, and turns his back, an insult the woman reads if not the visitor. Whoever the stranger is, her man is not afraid of him.
It is the young man who was with Paul Taurus, the bartender, when he shot himself. His eyes behind his thick glasses are pale and nervous and frightened, but there is a countermanding determination in the thrust of his chin. He peers around the room, at the gaudy woman, and then at the man who has returned to the couch and is slumped there, staring at the TV.
"Denny," he says, and approaches the couch, his hand extended.
Denny ignores the hand. He sits up. "Barbie Sue, go wash your hair or somethin'."
Barbie Sue blushes. She is not the kind of woman that blushing flatters. She crosses her arms, being careful of her nails.
"You can't order me around," she snaps. "There ain't anythin' I can't hear you say to this fruit."
The young man puckers his lips at her. "Same to you, sweetheart," he says.
"Both of you shut up," Denny drawls. "You watch how you talk to her," he says to the young man.
Barbie Sue preens victoriously. That's all she really wanted, just to have her sexual dominance acknowledged. "And you," he says to Barbie Sue, "I don't need your troublemakin'. Get the fuck outta here."
Barbie Sue slams out of the room.
The young man loiters in the middle of the floor, evidently on the verge of bolting.
Denny settles back on the couch.
"You ain't here on a social call, are you?"
The young man looks around nervously, and then pulls a straight-backed chair around, and sits down in it.
"Paul's dead," he says in a low voice.
Denny sits up, his eyes glittering. "Goddamn," he breathes. "What happened?" His eyes narrow. "It wasn't that fucking AIDS, was it?" He is already rising, his hands raised before him as if to ward off the dread disease.
The young man's jaw drops loose and he stares at Denny. "Jesus," he says. "Sweet Jesus."
"Well, was it?" Denny demands.
"No!" He cannot keep the disgust out of his voice. "You ignorant redneck."
Denny flies at him, catching him by surprise, knocking him out of the chair and onto the floor. The young man's glasses fly off. Once there, Denny quickly has him by the throat. Denny slaps him across the face, splitting his lip.
"How?" Denny screams at him.
The young man wipes his bloody lip, smearing blood across the back of his hand. His naked face is drained of color, taut with shock. "Shot himself," he said.
Denny releases him abruptly. "Goddamn," he says and gets up, walking away into the kitchen as if he were just taking advantage of a commercial break.
At first the young man does not move. Surreptitiously he wipes a tear from the corner of one eye, then he begins to grope for his glasses. He fumbles for a pocket-handkerchief to mop his mouth.
Denny comes back, carrying a bottle of vodka and two grimy juice glasses.
Pouring with one hand, holding the glasses in the other, he half fills each glass. He puts the bottle down on the TV and offers one glass to the young man, who has gotten to his feet and righted the chair.
"Here's to Paul," Denny says, and raises his glass.
The young man takes the glass and raises it, then knocks back a mouthful with alacrity. He winces at the sting of the alcohol in the split of his lip. Denny watches him, eyes bright, and Hollywood-white smile beaming.
"I always liked Paul," Denny said. "Even if he was queer."
The young man looks morosely into the empty glass. "He didn't like you," he said.
Denny shrugged. "Not his type," he said, and laughed. "Hit ya again?"
The young man accepted the refill. "Paul said you were the toughest one. He usta call you Killer."
Denny sucked at his glass of vodka. "Paul talked too much. All you queers do."
The young man put down his empty glass. "Look, I thought maybe it was worth something to you to know."
Denny nodded. "Made a special trip, didya?"
The young man put his hands in his jacket pockets. "I couldn't stay there. I didn't know who would be next."
Denny frowned. "I thought you said Paul shot himself."
The young man smiled. "He did. It took him a week to make up his mind."
Denny reached out and caught the young man's shirt and jerked him close. "Quit teasin' me, you cunt. What do you want?"
"To see your face, Killer," the young man said. "I want to know what you guys did that Paul couldn't stand living with. You don't have to tell me now. I can guess. At least you'll get yours, too."
Denny shook him and thrust him away. "You tell me, you whore. Why did Paul do it?"
"Because a week ago somebody blew Jackson away right in front of Paul's bar. And somebody called him every day for a week to say they were going to get you all."
Suddenly Denny looked sick.
The young man laughed.
Bayard Rohrer, the director, sucked his cigarillo and stared at the moviola screen. “I like it,” he said.
Over the director’s shoulder, Pat nodded. “Blows me away.”
Bayard spun his stool to face his assistant director, Mickey Cahill. “What do you think?” he said around his cigarillo.
Mickey scratched under his chin. He was growing a beard in imitation of the director’s, except Bayard Rohrer’s was the neat, glossy Vandyke of a man vain both of face and mind, and Mickey’s crinkly reddish hair was too anarchic and untameable for that style. Mickey’s beard wanted to grow like a mountain man’s or a biblical prophet’s and promised to look sparse no matter how wild and long it might eventually be.
“We might have a problem with Gay Rights,” he said.
Bayard snatched his cigarillo from his mouth and spun anxiously toward Pat.
“Look, all the homophobic stuff comes from our certified bad guy, or his moll,” Pat said. “I don’t think it’s a problem.”
“Maybe we’ll have a problem the other way. The fundamentalists will think we’re promoting homosexuality,” Bayard said. He hopped off the stool. He was very short, about five-foot-three, with very white, arsenical skin and lustrous black hair. Someone had told him that swimming lengthened the muscles and stretched the spine, so he swam faithfully each day, but did so secretively, because he was embarrassed by the almost total hairlessness of his body. When on location and forced to use a motel pool or a local Y, he wore one of his collection of silk kimonos right to poolside and donned it again as soon as he had swum his mile, to minimize his exposure while maximizing his display. Bayard spent phenomenal sums of money on tailor-made clothing that in their very perfection of proportion only emphasized his smallness. And like many small men, his head was quite large, so he looked dwarfish when he wasn’t.
Pat laughed. “Fundamentalists love war movies, Bayard. I don’t think they’re going to read Denny’s homophobia or his sleazy girlfriend as evidence of character defects, if they notice them at all, which I think is the likeliest scenario.”
Bayard laughed. Scenario was one of his favorite words. Delicately, he removed the cigarillo from between his thin lips and admired it. There was a sign on the door of the editing room that clearly said NO SMOKING. It was obeyed by everyone but the director.
Pat itched for a cigarette himself. He wondered if the smoke from Bayard’s little cigars was damaging the film, which naturally led to speculation about what would happen if Bayard accidentally ignited something with one of his butts, how many seconds it would take before the room, walled with shelves lined with film canisters, and hung with pieces of film like flystrips, was an inferno. Fortunately, Bayard was moving toward the door.
“I want some coffee,” he said.
Mickey Cahill jumped to open the door for the director. “What about Dian’s top?” he asked. “She’s really falling out of it.”
Bayard laughed again. “She did, once. You missed it, Mickey; you were
with the second unit.”
“Some set of garbonzas, huh?” Mickey asked. “Are they real?”
The director leered. “Ask Pat.”
Pat, bringing up the rear, wanted to duck. He settled for a noncommittal shrug.
Mickey dropped back a step to interrogate him. “Come on, man, let’s have it.”
“She dropped ‘em on me a couple of times,” Pat said. He was blushing, and the knowledge he was blushing made him blush even more. “Fell into me, you know. That’s all, honest.”
Mickey chortled. “All right! So are they real or not?”
Pat shrugged. “No. I don’t think so.”
Mickey pressed him. “What did they feel like?”
They arrived at the staff room. Pat skipped ahead to open the door for Bayard, who grinned at him wolfishly in passing. He was enjoying Pat’s discomfort, as well as the opportunity to tease Mickey.
The director picked out a comfortable chair while Mickey fetched the coffeepot and cups. Pat slumped onto the institutionally fucked-out sofa, a blue-green horror that must have been acquired at a discount furniture store close-out around about the time of the Korean police action. Mickey perched next to him, still breathing hard on the track of the evidence.
“Well?”
Pat reached for his coffee but stopped just short of touching it. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea this late at night. “I don’t remember,” he said.
Mickey howled. “You had ‘em in your hands, and you don’t remember?”
“You want to know so bad, why don’t you find out for yourself?” Pat snapped back.
The wind went out of Mickey. “I’ve tried,” he admitted. “How come she’s hot for you? They’re always hot for married guys.”
Bayard tasted his coffee and smiled omnisciently. “Mickey, that’s why.”
Mickey got up and slunk off to the bathroom, lost in the conundrum of women who only wanted what they couldn’t have, and Pat who didn’t want what Mickey couldn’t have.
The director took a vial of coke and a polished slice of stone from his breast pocket. He spilled a little powder onto the stone, took out a minuscule gold razor, and cut the coke into lines. He produced a tiny gold straw and offered it to Pat.
Pat hesitated, then shook his head no.
Bayard raised one eyebrow, and shrugged. “More for me,” he said gleefully, and vacuumed the stone clean through the straw. Afterward, he sat back with an air of postcoital satisfaction. “I admire your discretion,” he said, “in the matter of Dian’s extravagant tits.”
“There’s nothing to be discreet about,” Pat said. “But thanks.”
Bayard’s eyebrows rose and fell in a gesture of have-it-your-way.
“I thought she was rather obvious,” he said.
Pat shrugged. “She’s a nice girl. I like her. I won’t say it wasn’t attractive. But once she got the message, we got along fine. Better than we would have if I’d taken her up on it.”
“You were heroic,” the director said. “Jesus God, Pat, are you the last faithful husband in America?”
Pat laughed. “I don’t cheat, no, but I’m sure I’m not alone.” Sometimes he felt like he was. It was always oddly embarrassing to admit to monogamy. There was always the temptation to make a joke of it, and if he did, he felt shitty about doing it. Unfaithful in spirit. But if he said it straight, he felt like a Boy Scout. When had fidelity become embarrassing? And why?
“I must confess,” Bayard said, examining a fresh cigarillo, “I have a hard time imagining what it would be like to have sex with the same woman for so many years, and with no one else.” He laughed, seemingly a little embarrassed himself.
Suddenly conscious how tired and headachy he was, Pat said, “Sometimes monogamy is like a pair of cement boots,” and at once regretted it.
Bayard roared with delight.
Pat shrugged. “We have our dull times, and I think we’re done up, and then all of a sudden it gets glorious again. It’s like interest accruing, or something.”
Bayard, for once, seemed taken aback. “Really?”
Mickey Cahill shuffled out of the bathroom. He nursed the end of his nose with a large, dirty cotton handkerchief. His eyes were watering. The consolation he had indulged in the bathroom was not of the same high quality as the director’s.
Pat was relieved not to have had to turn down Mickey’s shitty coke, too. Mickey was more likely to feel personally rejected, but it surely wouldn’t have been worth it.
“Oh man,” Mickey groaned.
The director shrugged at Pat. “You can’t give a man advice he won’t take.”
It was raining hard outside. Between the door to the studio and his rented Audi, Pat was soaked to the skin. He sat there shivering for a minute, waiting for the defroster to clear the windows. The effort it took just to shiver made him realize he was desperately hungry. It was eleven, nearly everything would be closed. Except McDonald’s. If he had to eat another McDonald’s hamburger, he would puke. But he had to eat something, so he headed there.
It was just like the night he had gone home to see his mother, after the March on Washington. He had hitchhiked from the interstate exit to her small isolated home in Winthrop in a cold hard rain. Ellen Russell worked as a night nurse, eleven to seven shift, but he had managed to get home before she left for work.
She had opened the door in response to his banging, and her face lit up like Christmas at the sight of him. “Look who’s here,” she had said, and chuckled, way down in her throat, the way she did, all hoarse from her three-pack-a-day habit. “Kill the fatted calf,” she had said.
“Ma,” he had said, and dropped his sopping backpack in the shed and hugged her.
She was tall as he, though hardship had worn her thin and gray; she hugged him back hard enough to hurt.
“Well, get in outta the rain,” she had scolded. “I heard a car, and saw the lights in the driveway, I thought it was someone lost, turning themselves around.”
“Deke Utterback picked me up in Augusta,” Pat had said. “Told me I needed a shave and a haircut,” and she had laughed. Actually, what the selectman, whose boys had been Pat’s buddies in grade school, had said, was “Why do you want to cultivate on your face what grows wild on your ass, boy?”
“Have you eaten?” she wanted to know first off, and while he changed into dry clothes, worn shiny trousers that were too short in the leg and balky in the zipper, a shabby iridescent shirt that had once seemed daring and suave and now looked gauche to him, two pairs of holey mismatched socks for his poor tired blue-to-the-bone feet, she made him a supper of canned stew and toast and cocoa, and stuffed his wet boots with newspaper to dry on the furnace grate in the hall.
He wolfed the food while she chatted about the neighbors and her job and smoked and drank coffee.
Then Ellen asked him, “What brings you, Pat, on a night like this?”
“I was coming back from the demonstration in Washington,” he said. “It’s been a long time. Just thought I’d like to see you.”
She had snorted and laughed. “Well, good,” she said. “I guess I ought to be touched, you tramping through this nasty rain.”
He shrugged.
“You thumb the whole way?”
“Had a ride with a friend.”
“Couldn’t bring you right to the door, huh?”
She had a sixth sense about what he didn’t want to discuss with her. “My friend was a girl. We had a fight, okay?”
His mother rolled her cigarette between her fingers and her mouth twitched. “She put you out on the highway. In this rain. Musta been quite a fight.”
“She wanted to bring me here. I wouldn’t let her,” Pat said.
What went unspoken between them, because it didn’t need to be said, was the core of their family history: Ellen Russell had put his alcoholic father out, pushed him out of the pickup truck in the middle of downtown Lewiston late one night, after bailing him out of jail yet again. Pat had been seven then, and while in time
he came to appreciate the peace that descended once the family was sundered, once his father disappeared into the no-man’s-land that is the true country of the winos, he still felt, though he knew otherwise, that she was responsible for his fatherlessness.
“Ah.” Ellen Russell let him eat a while, but she was not finished. “Why not?”
“Why not what?” Pat responded, deliberately obtuse.
“Why couldn’t she bring you here?”
He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and grinned. “Ma, you got it backward. I couldn’t bring her here.”
But, of course, that didn’t end it; it only made Ellen want to know more.
“Why?”
He sat back. “Ma, this is what set us off the last time I was here.”
Ellen shook out a fresh butt and lit it. “You mean, your Private Life.”
“Yeah, ma,” Pat said. “That’s right.”
Ellen sat back and blew smoke out her nostrils. Pat coughed and waved it away. She tossed him the pack and waited for him to light up in self-defense.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “I’ve had time enough.”
Pat waited. He was supposed to be feeling guilty about not having been home in seven months, and he was. He was also getting pissed at being jerked around.
“All right,” she said. “Hot shot. You’re right. I’m not ever going to let you shack up under my roof.”
Pat raised his hands in surrender. “Up to you, ma.”
Her flat, white-uniformed bosom rose and fell in a great sigh. “I don’t understand you kids, the way you act like trash. But,” she said, and leaned across the table toward him, “you are a grown man.”
“Right on,” Pat muttered.
“Just,” she said. “Mister. Just.”
“Ma,” he said.
She held up her hand. “I hate the thought of my son using girls like whores.”
“I’ll leave that up to you, ma,” Pat said. “That’s what you’re doing when you tell me there’ll be no fornicatin’ under your roof. You’re callin’ my girlfriend a whore.”
“No,” she said. “You’re wrong about that. My house is my house. I make the rules here. What I’m saying is, I can’t stop you screwing around. Just you doing it here. What I am asking you is, be responsible about it. It takes two to make a whore, Pat.”