Famous Builder (16 page)

Three hours later, at eleven o’clock, I’m still talking. I’ve eaten not two, but three servings of her eggplant lasagna. Calmer now, I’m clearly making up for my involuntary starvation of the week before. I tell her all about Antoinette, about the radical growth of her music, her public endorsement of my work, and her deft recognition of the mistake. Kate looks and listens with the keenest expression, though I can’t help but notice the furrow above her speckled brown eyes. Am I talking too much? Am I simply too excited? Am I making her feel bad in some way? Enumerating Antoinette’s many virtues, I get the strangest feeling—both thrilling and awful—that I’m moving away from Kate, though I have no idea what that might mean.
I am here
, I tell myself.
I am sitting on Kate Papagallo’s sofa on August 1, 1976, and I am alive in the world.

After eleven o’clock, we walk into the living room, where we sip tea from fancy Italian mugs. I am totally exhausted and dehydrated from spending so much time in the air. My excitement is finally catching up with me, and every so often, when Kate’s not looking, I close my eyes. I drift off. My head falls forward like a puppet’s. Is that my chin pressing against my collarbone?

I’m not even sure how we’ve gotten where we are, but she says something like: “I just think she’s jealous of you.”

“Who?
What?
”

She grimaces and smiles all at once. “Nancy,” she says. “Mrs. Fallon.
You
brought her up, Paul.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, she wouldn’t be talking behind your back if she didn’t feel so threatened.”

My eyes spring open. “She’s been talking behind my back?”

Kate nods, her eyes filling up with concern. Among other things, she tells me that Mrs. Fallon doesn’t want to use my music anymore, that she never really liked it, that I’m simply getting a little too big for my britches.

My forehead’s hot now. Of course, I’ve sensed all these things for months, but it’s something else to hear them confirmed. “I’ll show her,” I say in a gruff whisper.

“She’s lonely, disappointed. She hasn’t gotten what she wanted in life.”

I roll my eyes.

“Paul—”

“I’ll show her,” I say in the calmest voice I can muster. “I’m going to go to music school just like Mr. Schaffer, and she’s going to be sorry she ever said anything bad about me.”

She laughs. “Mr. Schaffer?”

“Mr. Schaffer.” I redden. What I really want to say is that I want to be like Antoinette, playing in church
and
playing for a larger audience, but that sounds too immodest.

“Mr. Schaffer’s a nobody,” she says. “He makes $12,000 a year, and he can’t even afford the rent on his apartment. What kind of life is that? You’re better than that.”

I’m mute. All along I thought that Kate had fully supported my musical aspirations. She knew I was going to music school. What does she think I’ve been doing with my life—playing?

“So what do you expect me to do, be a CPA like John?”

Kate gets up from the sofa. She walks into the kitchen, where she runs the sink and latches the dishwasher. The water jets and churns, the motor loud as a tractor. I look about the living room with its antique grandfather’s clock, its bright Venetian glassware. I think, Is she really so happy here?

When she comes back, her face is softer and kinder, closer to the Kate I’ve always loved. She sits down beside me on the sofa and hands me a foil-wrapped chocolate shaped like a fish. “I’ve been meaning to tell you—” she says.

“What?”

“We’re moving to Princeton. John’s been promoted.”

My throat tightens. “No way.”

“We’ve already picked out the house. We’re leaving in a few months.”

***

On September 15th, the choir is back in full swing. We sing “Wisdom Has Built Herself a House” for Communion, but there’s a chilly vigor to our performance that makes me long for the days when we were a little less polished, when a shaky alto part transmitted a certain humanness. Maybe it’s just that our heads and hearts are still somewhere back on Long Beach Island and we’re not ready for the enormous commitment that weekly choir demands. Has something changed? It feels as if we’re collectively afraid of something, and though we’re still honoring the purpose of our group, our protective distance is keeps our harmonies from actually
gelling.

My mother makes no secret about how she feels about Kate. She tells me Kate had no right to dampen my enthusiasm after my return from Wisconsin, that I didn’t need to be told of Mrs. Fallon’s cruelty. My mother finds Kate’s behavior appalling, and she wonders where her loyalties really lie. I’m a bit baffled by the depths of my mother’s pain. I know that she doesn’t want to see me hurt, but her reaction seems to be about … is there something I don’t know? When I try to defend Kate, when I say, “She only tried to help me,” she shakes her head; she doesn’t want to hear it. Has she been a little jealous of her old friend’s sway over me? Their mutual tension quavers across the aisle. They stand on either end of the row of six sopranos, too full of feeling to speak to each other.

After Mass, on Kate’s last day, she hands back her choir book to Mrs. Fallon with a tentative embrace. Mrs. Fallon pushes a piece of Kate’s blond hair behind her ear and they laugh with downcast eyes, promise to stay in touch. Princeton is only an hour away, and they declare that they’ll be seeing a lot of each other, even though Kate will be singing in a brand-new choir, this one directed by—who would have guessed it?—Mr. Schaffer.

Kate turns to me. I walk her to her car, where Holly and Sean punch each other on the backseat. We don’t have much to say, and there’s still more than a little uncertainty between us. Something ineffable has happened; how are we to behave toward each other? When she reaches out to hug me, I break down, to my shock. I bury my face in Kate’s hair and can’t stop the sobs from coming up my throat. “Oh,
God
,” I say. Some people have stopped to look, and I hug her, hug her harder than I thought possible, and she hugs me back, says, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I don’t even know what has happened between us, and it all seems too complicated for me to untangle. She holds me for the duration of my sobs, stroking the back of my head, and she doesn’t let go until I’m quiet, until I’m almost breathing normally again and my cheek is resting against her hot wet collar.

She backs out of her parking space. We wave to each other. I swipe my nose with my forefinger and laugh. I am laughing through my tears. Is it only that I already know that she’ll be the last woman I’ll ever fall in love with, and I don’t want to be homeless, and it scares me that I don’t know where I’m going next?

***

On a raw overcast morning, in late 1997, the infamous Reverend Fred Phelps, of “Godhatesfags.com” fame, marches with his “family” outside the town hall of Provincetown, Massachusetts, my off-and-on home for the last seven years. We’ve been buzzing for weeks; their expected demonstration is anticipated with as much horror and dread as the KKK’s arrival in Skokie over ten years ago. It goes without saying that Provincetown has enormous symbolic value to many as a zone of safety and refuge. Hundreds of men and women have spent their final years here, and in spite of its reputation as a gay amusement park, it’s a kind of Benares to some. How many have strewn the grit of their lost loves in the marshes outside of town? Sometimes when I’m alone, when I’m out on the fire road with our two retrievers, I imagine all those souls watching me from the other world with their calm and curious eyes.

I arrive at the designated time on my bicycle to see the family Phelps sing their hymns on the green in front of the Bas Relief. As much as I think I’ve prepared myself for the demonstration, nothing quite readies me for the sight of all those ghastly slogans. There’s something psychologically toxic about the Day-Glo colors of their placards. This isn’t any accident; they know exactly what they’re doing. Some of my friends, too cynical and weary to get worked up about the whole affair, will find the sheer exaggeration of the signs (AIDS=GOD’S GIFT TO FAGS, complete with two male stick figures entangled in a sex act) flat-out comic, unwilling to admit that the world outside Provincetown, South Beach, West Hollywood, and Chelsea might be darker than we’re willing to admit. But as I look around at the collective grief written on the faces of the townspeople who’ve gathered here (straight and gay, drag queen and fisherman), I feel only the deepest rage.

I pick out one of the demonstrators and shoot him the finger.

Then I cringe. I’m doing exactly what he wants me to do.

The guy focuses on me, mumbling his stream of hate as if he’s speaking in tongues.

He thinks I’m the rabble-rouser. He thinks I’m going to be the one to get things going.
Sorry, pal. It’s not going to be me. But, Lord, how I wish someone would fling a rock at your head.

I’m exhausted, bludgeoned. It drizzles; my melancholy deepens when a young man, face ravaged by illness, approaches with his dog tucked underneath his arm, looking toward the demonstrators with an emptied incredulousness. He shouldn’t have to see this. When Mark, my partner, pedals up to me on his bicycle, eyes glistening with amazement, I’m seized with an irrational need to protect him, though I stop; he can certainly take care of himself. He shouldn’t have to see this either. We put our arms around each other, calmer and probably more shaken than we’re willing to admit, before he pedals off to buy some bread at the Cheese Market.

Just as I’ve decided I’ve had my fill, a therapist in town, an older woman in a long gauzy dress, who’s lost dozens of her dearest clients to AIDS, wanders up from Ryder Street. She approaches me with waving hands. “What are we doing here? What on earth are we all doing here?” Someone with a yellow armband tries to subdue her (after all, we’re not supposed to get too stirred up), but it’s not much use. She doesn’t want to admit that there isn’t a simple answer to this question, and when I attempt to think aloud about it, explaining that it’s probably some combination of things—voyeurism and duty, witness and activism—my language crumbles. She won’t have it. Perhaps it’s just too slippery to talk about. Then, out of nowhere, she says: “How do you know they’re not using your songs?”

I just look at her. I’m about to say “too musically complicated, too theologically uncertain,” but that sounds too self-serving. I shuffle my feet, angry with myself for keeping silent.

“How would you stop them from using your music?”

Well, I couldn’t, could I?

She walks away. Our gestures mean nothing. Although Phelps leaves town to the jeers and gibes of the townspeople, it’s hard not to feel a sense of deepest defeat.

***

Is it only because I’ve always imagined such judgment about my work that I’ve redirected my artistic lens toward other creative tasks?

The music I wrote in my teens and early twenties still appears in hymnals and songbooks all across the country, and more than once, wandering into church while visiting my parents, I’ve heard a choir struggling through one of my responsorial psalms. It’s like a visit from a lost side of myself. I’ve kept this aspect of my personality hidden from my friends, some of my very closest friends, for reasons that are not quite clear to me. Is it only that I’ve wanted to present a coherent version of myself, and that facet of my personality is in contradiction to everything else that they know about me? It’s probably more complicated than that. After all, it’s over thirty years after that brief, fleeting period in which there was so much hope and possibility about the church, before the institution settled back into its fearful, conservative ways. Lately I’ve been thinking about working on some new music, but how can one not feel a huge ambivalence about Christianity in this day and age? How can one ignore charges about colluding with the enemy? Organized religion has never seemed darker or more destructive. And while it would be simplistic to implicate all Christian denominations by pointing to Fred Phelps, I sometimes think his tawdry protests merely distill and intensify an all-too-pervasive point of view.

But I can’t help but think that I’ve all but killed a certain aspect of my creative life, that my decision to turn away from music has come at a cost. Today I tell myself this, How compelling to celebrate all that’s potentially wondrous about the world: hope, mercy, justice, goodness, light. How compelling to name what we’d
want
God to be, even if He or She remains elusive and intractable, resisting our definitions. I’m told that Bach and Brahms were ambivalent about writing for the church, that many of the most accomplished liturgical composers were gay men. Not that I’m placing myself in the camp of Britten and Poulenc, but I’m grateful that they kept on working. You’d have to be foolish to think otherwise.

I haven’t talked to Kate in ten years. She began a long series of moves that took her to Bryn Mawr, then back to Princeton, then on to Greenwich, Connecticut. She and John are likely very rich now. I suppose she still sings in a choir, but she probably performs Handel now rather than the Dameans. Nor have I kept in touch with Mrs. Fallon or Mrs. Wills, though I assume they continue to meet their respective ensembles every Tuesday night. Antoinette Napolitano lives in Nashville, where she writes and publishes country music; I’ve seen her name on the liner notes of various CDs. And Mr. Schaffer? Mr. Schaffer was one of the first people I knew to die of AIDS, all the way back in 1981.

Sometimes I imagine Kate standing in the sanctuary of her stylish, mossy brick church in Greenwich. Does she ever think of me? If, coming upon one of my responsorial psalms in her parish hymnal, would she still pore over that fusion of melody, harmony, and text? Would she try to sing it to herself? What if she knew the truth about me: that I’m happy, that I’ve spent years living with a man whom I’m just crazy about? Would she return the book to its rack? I can’t ever know the answer to that, but I’d like to think that she’d surprise me, linking us across space and time, through all those lives.

The Anchorage Point house smells weirdly lemony inside as if a can of latex paint had been left open and allowed to sit for weeks. The electric baseboards tick; kerosene fumes permeate the atmosphere. Although it’s bone-chilling damp, Bobby and I sweat through the layers of our shirts, working harder to keep ourselves warm. Outside, the lagoon is already turning to ice. The phragmites on the opposite bank have browned, the marsh grass in the distance flattened like a tatami mat. The sky above the bay looks swollen, as if it’s actually inhaling all that freezing salt water, but somehow we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. So what if the heat doesn’t quite work, that our father drained the pipes for the winter months ago.