(That locked room. My mother’s vanity; my father’s highboy. If Denny and I, still in our costumes, had left that bedroom, its floor strewn with my mother’s shoes and handbags, and gone through the darkened living room, out onto the sunstruck porch, down the sidewalk, and up the street, how would we have carried ourselves? Would we have walked boldly, chattering extravagantly back and forth between ourselves, like drag queens refusing to acknowledge the stares of contempt that are meant to halt them? Would we have walked humbly, with the calculated, impervious piety of the condemned walking barefoot to the public scaffold? Would we have walked simply, as deeply accustomed to the normalcy of our own strangeness as Siamese twins? Or would we have walked gravely, a solemn procession, like Bucky Trueblood’s gang, their manhood hanging from their unzipped trousers?
(We were eleven years old. Why now, more than two decades later, do I wonder for the first time how we would have carried ourselves through a publicness we would have neither sought nor dared? I am six feet two inches tall; I weigh 198 pounds. Given my size, the question I am most often asked about my youth is “What football position did you play?” Overseas I am most commonly taken to be a German or a Swede. Right now, as I write this, I am wearing L. L. Bean khaki trousers, a LaCoste shirt, Weejuns: the anonymous American costume, although partaking of certain signs of class and education, and, most recently, partaking also of certain signs of sexual orientation, this costume having become the standard garb of the urban American gay man. Why do I tell you these things? Am I trying—not subtly—to inform us of my “maleness,” to reassure us that I have “survived” without noticeable “complexes”? Or is this my urge, my constant urge, to complicate my portrait of myself to both of us, so that I might layer my selves like so many multicolored crinoline slips, each rustling as I walk? When the wind blows, lifting my skirt, I do not know which slip will be revealed.)
Sometimes, while Denny and I were dressing up, Davis would come home unexpectedly from the bowling alley, where he’d been hanging out since entering junior high. At the bowling alley he was courting the protection of Bucky’s gang.
“Let me in!” he’d demand, banging fiercely on the bedroom door, behind which Denny and I were scurrying to wipe the makeup off our faces with Kleenex.
“We’re not doing anything,” I’d protest, buying time.
“Let me in this minute or I’ll tell!”
Once in the room, Davis would police the wreckage we’d made, the emptied hatboxes, the scattered jewelry, the piled skirts and blouses. “You’d better clean this up right now,” he’d warn. “You two make me sick.”
Yet his scorn seemed modified by awe. When he helped us rehang the clothes in the closet and replace the jewelry in the candy box, a sullen accomplice destroying someone else’s evidence, he sometimes handled the garments as though they were infused with something of himself, although at the precise moment when he seemed to find them loveliest, holding them close, he would cast them down.
After our dress-up sessions Denny would leave the house without good-byes. I was glad to see him go. We would not see each other for days, unless we met by accident; we never referred to what we’d done the last time we’d been together. We met like those who have murdered are said to meet, each tentatively and warily examining the other for signs of betrayal. But whom had we murdered? The boys who walked into that room? Or the women who briefly came to life within it? Perhaps this metaphor has outlived its meaning. Perhaps our shame derived not from our having killed but from our having created.
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, as Denny and I entered seventh grade, my father became ill. Over Labor Day weekend he was too tired to go fishing. On Monday his skin had vaguely yellowed; by Thursday he was severely jaundiced. On Friday he entered the hospital, his liver rapidly failing; Sunday he was dead. He died from acute hepatitis, possibly acquired while cleaning up after our sick dog, the doctor said. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, down the hill from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. After the twenty-one-gun salute, our mother pinned his colonel’s insignia to our jacket lapels. I carried the flag from his coffin to the car. For two weeks I stayed home with my mother, helping her write thank-you notes on small white cards with black borders; one afternoon, as I was affixing postage to the square, plain envelopes, she looked at me across the dining room table. “You and Davis are all I have left,” she said. She went into the kitchen and came back. “Tomorrow,” she said, gathering up the note cards, “you’ll have to go to school.” Mornings I wandered the long corridors alone, separated from Denny by the fate of our last names, which had cast us into different homerooms and daily schedules. Lunchtimes we sat together in silence in the rear of the cafeteria. Afternoons, just before gym class, I went to the Health Room, where, lying on a cot, I’d imagine the Phys. Ed. coach calling my name from the class roll, and imagine my name, unclaimed, unanswered to, floating weightlessly away, like a balloon that one jumps to grab hold of but that is already out of reach. Then I’d hear the nurse dial the telephone. “He’s sick again,” she’d say. “Can you come pick him up?” At home I helped my mother empty my father’s highboy. “No, we want to save that,” she said when I folded his uniform into a huge brown bag that read GOODWILL INDUSTRIES; I wrapped it in a plastic dry-cleaner’s bag and hung it in the hall closet.
After my father’s death my relationship to my mother’s things grew yet more complex, for as she retreated into her grief, she left behind only her mute objects as evidence of her life among us: objects that seemed as lonely and vulnerable as she was, objects that I longed to console, objects with which I longed to console myself—a tangled gold chain, thrown in frustration on the mantel; a wineglass, its rim stained with lipstick, left unwashed in the sink. Sometimes at night Davis and I heard her prop her pillow up against her bedroom wall, lean back heavily, and tune her radio to a call-in show: “Nightcaps, what are you thinking at this late hour?” Sunday evenings, in order to help her prepare for the next day’s job hunt, I stood over her beneath the bare basement bulb, the same bulb that first illuminated my father’s jaundice. I set her hair, slicking each wet strand with gel and rolling it, inventing gossip that seemed to draw us together, a beautician and his customer.
“You have such pretty hair,” I’d say.
“At my age, don’t you think I should cut it?” She was almost fifty.
“No, never.”
THAT FALL DENNY AND I were caught. One evening my mother noticed something out of place in her closet. (Perhaps now that she no longer shared it, she knew where every belt and scarf should have been.)
I was in my bedroom doing my French homework, dreaming of one day visiting Au Printemps, the store my teacher spoke of so excitedly as she played us the Edith Piaf records that she had brought back from France. In the mirror above my desk I saw my mother appear at my door.
“Get into the living room,” she said. Her anger made her small, reflected body seem taut and dangerous.
In the living room Davis was watching TV with Uncle Joe, our father’s brother, who sometimes came to take us fishing. Uncle Joe was lying in our father’s La-Z-Boy recliner.
“There aren’t going to be any secrets in this house,” she said. “You’ve been in my closet. What were you doing there?”
“No, we weren’t,” I said. “We were watching TV all afternoon.”
“We? Was Denny here with you? Don’t you think I’ve heard about that? Were you and Denny going through my clothes? Were you wearing them?”
“No, Mom,” I said.
“Don’t lie!” She turned to Uncle Joe, who was staring at us. “Make him stop! He’s lying to me!”
She slapped me. Although I was already taller than she, she slapped me over and over, slapped me across the room until I was backed against the TV. Davis was motionless, afraid. But Uncle Joe jumped up and stood between my mother and me, holding her until her rage turned to sobs. “I can’t be both a mother and a father,” she said to him. “I can’t, I can’t do it.” I could no
t look at Uncle Joe, who, although he was protecting me, did not know I was lying.
She looked at me. “We’ll discuss this later,” she said. “Get out of my sight.”
We never discussed it. Denny was outlawed. I believe, in fact, that it was I who suggested he never be allowed in our house again. I told my mother I hated him. I do not think I was lying when I said this. I truly hated him—hated him, I mean, for being me.
For two or three weeks Denny tried to speak with me at the bus stop, but whenever he approached, I busied myself with kids I barely knew. After a while Denny found a new best friend, Lee, a child despised by everyone, for Lee was “effeminate.” His clothes were too fastidious; he often wore his cardigan over his shoulders, like an old woman feeling a chill. Sometimes, watching the street from our picture window, I’d see Lee walking toward Denny’s house. “What a queer,” I’d say to whoever might be listening. “He walks like a girl” Or sometimes, at the junior high school, I’d see him and Denny walking down the corridor, their shoulders pressed together as if they were telling each other secrets, or as if they were joined in mutual defense. Sometimes when I saw them, I turned quickly away, as though I’d forgotten something important in my locker. But when I felt brave enough to risk rejection, for I belonged to no group, I joined Bucky Trueblood’s gang, sitting on the radiator in the main hall, and waited for Lee and Denny to pass us. As Lee and Denny got close, they stiffened and looked straight ahead.
“Faggots,” I muttered.
I looked at Bucky, sitting in the middle of the radiator. As Lee and Denny passed, he leaned forward from the wall, accidentally disarranging the practiced severity of his clothes, his jeans puckering beneath his tooled belt, the breast pocket of his T-shirt drooping with the weight of a pack of Pall Malls. He whistled. Lee and Denny flinched. He whistled again. Then he leaned back, the hard lines of his body reasserting themselves, his left foot striking a steady beat on the tile floor with the silver V tap of his black loafer.
THE AGE OF ANXIETY
David B. Feinberg
I BLAME IT ALL ON THE EXISTENTIALISTS. Before I heard of them compliments Madame Escoffier, third-year French, life proceeded as smoothly as the automatic door at the A&P. I would step on the rubber pad outside the supermarket, activating sensors causing the door to open automatically; I would enter and the door would close silently behind me. I would sleepwalk through life with as little thought as the electric eye on an elevator. I had such confidence! I operated under the assumption that no conscious intervention from me was really ever necessary. My life was a moving sidewalk, effortlessly transporting me from one destination to another.
But then in tenth grade Madame Escoffier had us read The Stranger by Albert Camus and nothing was ever the same. I realized that intention underlay every action. At gym class when Mister D would call attendance I would be overcome with fear. Suppose I didn’t answer “here” when he called out “Eisenberg”? Suppose that at that moment I were unable to speak, temporarily struck mute? Suppose instead of responding in an appropriate manner I swore involuntarily? And what if I did not recognize my own name? What if I opened my mouth and a pigeon flew out?
Now, twenty years later, I stand at the 50th Street IND station. I hear the buzzer; the sign flashes “DOWNTOWN” in dot-matrix red bulbs; I stumble down the stairs. Although the train is not yet visible I know it will turn the comer in approximately one minute and thirty seconds. I can already feel the breeze in the tunnel. I see the bright lights approaching: the eyes of a snake. The train thunders closer, an unstoppable natural phenomenon, an act of God. I stand, transfixed, and wonder, will this be the time that the bright lights will hypnotize me into jumping? Will I spring out onto the tracks at the last possible moment, leaving no time for the conductor to pull the emergency switch? I walk backwards and cling to a steel girder, grasping it tightly, fearing that the rush of air may suck me onto the track, that the third rail live with 600 volts may erupt in an electrical explosion, shooting sparks on the platform. If I stood in front of the painted textured line that the Transit Authority has painted parallel to the tracks for the blind, some madman might push me onto the tracks after bounding down the stairs with an evil glint in his eye.
The train pulls in and stops. One door opens near me (the other is stuck) and I enter the car. The door closes. I know I have passed the point of danger. Now there is nothing to worry about except whether the man who is smoking a cigarette has a knife and whether the soda stain on the floor will make my shoes pick up the discarded New York Post with the latest AIDS HYSTERIA headline screaming at me and whether the sleeping man with urine stains on his pants is breathing or dead and whether the well-worn cards giving instructions on signing the alphabet the deaf-mute passes out have any contagious diseases and whether the teenage couple of alien ethnicity are laughing at me because they’ve seen my earring and whether the extremely obese woman who has sat next to me will allow me to exit at West Fourth Street.
Why I’m Upset
I’m upset for a variety of reasons, but mainly because my best friend and former lover Richard has just informed me that he was moving to San Francisco in two days. I’m on my way downtown to see him tonight for dinner and maybe to try to persuade him not to go. Richard had called me at work, around noon.
“Hi, BJ. Do you want a cat?”
“What cat?”
“Jessica.” Jessica was Richard’s eighteen-pound misanthropic cat. She had spent eight months at the Bide-A-Wee shelter on the East Side before Richard rescued her. People would coo “What a beautiful cat” and try to pick her up. After Jessica bit them, they’d decide on some cute kittens or an unhousebroken angora instead. Richard took one look at Jessica and fell for her. He sensed that she too had been abused. I loved to go over to Richard’s and play with Jessica; it was always fun watching her squirm out of my arms. Richard called her The Weasel. “Jesssssssica,” he would sibilate, “come over, sweetie, potato.”
“Why would you want to get rid of Jessica? Are you sick of her or something?”
“No, I’m moving.”
“You’re WHAT?”
“I’m moving to San Francisco.”
“What do you mean, you’re moving to San Francisco?”
“I’m moving to San Francisco Friday and I wanted to know if you would take care of Jessica for me.”
“You’re moving to San Francisco in TWO DAYS? Richard, this is crazy. You don’t just move to San Francisco in TWO DAYS!”
“I’ve had the tickets since Sunday. You know I’ve always been thinking of moving to San Francisco. I just can’t take the heat anymore. Remember last summer, and the summer before, I said I couldn’t take another August in New York City? I hate it here. I hate my job. I hate the subways. I hate the noise. I hate the crowds. I’ve been living in New York for eleven years and I think it’s time to move on.”
“But you never even been to San Francisco! You don’t just MOVE to a place you’ve never even visited. You go on a vacation and then you come back. If you like it, you quit your job, give up your apartment, pack up your belongings and go. You make arrangements with your gym and your phone and your electric and your cat. You don’t just leave on a week’s notice.”
“I had a feeling you would react this way. I should have known, you’ve never been supportive of my decisions.”
“Have you told any other of your friends? Have you even told your therapist? I bet you haven’t because you’re afraid they’ll talk you out of going. I think you’re just trying to run away from all of your problems and moving to San Francisco won’t help. I think—”
“I think this discussion has gone far enough and it’s quite pointless to continue it. I called to ask if you wanted my cat. I guess you don’t. I’ll speak to you later when you’re more rational. Good-bye, BJ.”
Richard himself was no model of sanity. I had met him four years ago on the street. He had gone home to pee because at the time he had found that he was incapable of performing this bodily fun
ction anywhere other than home. Richard had a history of depression that went back ten years. He had an extensive support network of friends and acquaintances who would do nearly anything for him, and for a while he liked me the best because he knew that compassion didn’t come easy to me and he saw me as a challenge.
Men on Men 2 Page 4