Heavy Water: And Other Stories (26 page)

Just when it seemed that it could expand no further (where, he wondered, was all this
coming
from?), Cleve’s upper body burst into a whole new category of immensity. Hooked over the twin tureens of his laterals, Cleve’s arms now felt uselessly short, like those of a tyrannosaurus; and his head appeared to be no bigger than a grapefruit, forming a rounded apex to the broad triangle of his neck. Cressida was growing, too. On the street, on Greenwich Avenue, nobody looked at Cleve, because everybody looked like Cleve looked, but everybody looked at Cressida, whose sexual destiny, every day, was more and more candidly manifest. No need to out Cressida, not now … They didn’t talk about it. They talked about books. But as he escorted her from the Idle Hour, west, to the brink of Christopher Street, he noticed how people stared and pointed and whispered. Oh, Cleve knew what they were saying (he’d said such things himself, and not so long ago):
reproducer, carrier, bearer, spawner, swarmer
. On Greenwich Avenue, one time, an old woman called
him
a
fertilizer
. So they weren’t just staring at Cressida: they thought
Cleve
was straight. Walking beside her, now, his protective instincts were regularly roused; he could almost hear them, his instincts, waking up, yawning, stretching, rubbing their eyes. But he also felt that he was in the end zone of his fair-mindedness, his tolerance—his neutrality. How could you protect Cressida from what was coming her way? He experienced abject and lavish relief when, late in the fifth month, she left for San Francisco, to join John.

The supermarket tabloids were calling it the straight cancer and the straight plague, but even the
New York Times
, in its frequent reports and updates, struck a note of heavily subdued monotony that sounded to Cleve like the forerunner of full hysteria. A spokesman for the Bay Area Network of Straight Physicians noted that certain unsanitary practices, including (unavoidable) recourse to backstreet obstetricians, provided a “breeding ground” for disease. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Straight Women’s Health Crisis Center demanded prompt government funding to meet the emergency—a demand that was itself dismissed as an attempt to establish “the first straight pork barrel.” A spokesman for the Anti-Family Church Coalition predictably announced that the straight subculture had brought this scourge on itself. As for the new president, asked about the hundreds of known cases of ovarian infection, septicemia, and puerperal fever—all of them straight-related—replied, stoutly: “I wouldn’t know.”

Cleve and Cressida were still pals. They were pen pals. At the outset he imagined a correspondence of remarkable—indeed publishable—brilliance, all about fiction. But it didn’t turn out that way. Cressida’s letters, he soon found, were irreducibly quotidian. The cooker, the clothes dryer, the conversion of the box room—should she paint it blue or pink? “I know you’re interested in home improvement,” she wrote, “but this isn’t decoration. This is
nesting.”
Dutifully Cleve’s football jersey quaked over the kitchen table, leaning on the pad and ballpoint, as he attempted sophisticated riffs about exactly
how
Fanny Price made time with Mary Crawford, exactly
how
Frank Churchill strapped on Mr. Knightly. And the next morning what would he get but another nine-pager on Cressida’s health insurance or plumbing bills. Such was straight life. Her letters didn’t bore him. He found himself both gripped and frazzled. It was like getting hooked on one of those British soap operas they showed on cable: proletarian ups and downs, week in week out, relentless and endless, lasting longer than a lifetime. Cressida was really big now, splay-footed and short-winded, and constantly fanning herself.

Irv. Irv looked a lot like Cleve. Harv had looked a lot like Cleve, too, as had Grove, as had Orv. But Irv and Cleve (as Irv pointed out) were like the two sides of the same ass. That first time, when they groped toward each other through the fumes of Folsom Prison, Cleve felt he was walking into a mirror—reaching out and finding the glass was warm and soft. Sometimes, now, when Irv mislaid his house keys (which Irv was always doing), Cleve buzzed him up and waited for the knock and then went to the door, feeling entirely depersonalized, wiped out, to admit his usurper, his sharer, his shadow. It was like the recurring nightmare in the novels of William Burroughs, when your dreadful ditto comes calling. Burroughs! More straight fiction … Back in the first few days of their relationship, when they still had sex, Cleve and Irv always did it missionary, face-to-face; and Cleve was Narcissus, riveted to the reflection of his own watery being.

Halfway through the eighth month, with the onset of pelvic vascular congestion, the soap from San Francisco became sharply medicalized. Gone were the bland mentions of breathing exercises and health checks. In her letters Cressida now spoke of such things as vaginal cynosis, asymmetrical uterine enlargement, and low-albumin-count urinalyses. Cleve forged on with a florid account of his recent trip—with Irv—to Kampuchea. Then came the news that the baby was breached: It seemed that the baby intended to be born feet first … Late at night (Irv was elsewhere), Cleve was in the bathroom thinking about caesarean sections. He stood and faced the mirror. Behind which his medications were arranged in ranks, like spectators. Modern hypochondriacs are not just hypochondriacs. They are also Hypochondriacs, self-conscious representatives of a Syndrome. So even when they’re in great shape,
and feeling
in great shape, they remain terrified by their own suggestibility; scared of their own minds. Cleve went into the bedroom and, with the phone on his lap, touched the forbidden numbers.

“…  Grainge?”

“Let’s not do this, Cleve.”

“…  Grainge?”

“Cleve. Really.”

“I’m going to be good,” said Cleve in a childish voice. “I just wanted to ask you about something else.”

“Let’s make this quick, Cleve.”

“Grainge? Years ago, you had a straight phase, right? In your youth. Straight encounters or episodes.”

“What?”

“You were a kid. Just out of Boy Camp. Your first job. You were a caterer at that nurses’ college?”

“Oh
that
. Sure. So?”

“What did that tell you, Grainge?”

“It didn’t tell me anything. Listen, they got a name for it: situational heterosexuality.”

“But what did that mean, Grainge?”

“It didn’t mean anything. It meant any port in a storm. What’s up with you, Cleve?”

“Nothing. It’s okay. I’m good … Grainge?”

“Cleve. Really.”

“Grainge. Oh, Grainge …”

“Let’s not do this, Cleve.”

Soon afterwards he returned to the bathroom and got his mustache all warm and soapy. Then he reached for Irv’s straight razor. Cleve knew: there was a girl child coming. The wrong way up.

Overnight, as usual, spring turned into summer. The sun erected itself on silver filaments above the city and started cooking it, bringing out all its aromas and flavors and humors, the trace remains of a century’s pizzas and burgers and furters.

Attired in a magenta angel top and orange sateen boxing pants and high-sider tennis shoes with yard-long laces (and no socks), Cleve stood, one gruelly afternoon, outside the Idle Hour. Facing him, in her familiar black cotton dress, stood Cressida. They both had a battered look. Cressida, of course, had undergone the internal struggle of biology. Cleve was bruised, too, but more recently and obviously and superficially. He was with Irv. The night before, they had had a fistfight about which was better: Florence or Rome.

This reunion, so far, was being completely cool. Nothing personal. They strolled west. Cleve intended to accompany her as far as Seventh Avenue; then he would retrace his steps, and proceed to Magnificent Obsession. When he walked, Cleve’s thighs jostled and sideswiped one another very noticeably, and very loudly. His upper body was holding steady; but his lower body was hugely enlarged. Those thighs: he could only find room for them by standing with his feet about a yard apart.

“Whew,” he said on the corner, swaying there in the heat. “Good to see you again.” He reached out a hand, which she didn’t take.

“Wait,” said Cressida. “I thought you might like to see the baby.”

Christopher Street was not what he had built it up to be. For instance, it wasn’t even called Christopher Street, not this bit of it anyway: a new sign had been tacked over the old one like a temporary number plate. He might have asked his companion about that, but he didn’t need to. The straight district told you all about itself. It was
out
.
SITE OF THE STONEWALL RIOTS, JUNE
27–29, 1969, said the white lettering on the black window of some impenetrable lockup or godown:
BIRTH OF THE MODERN STRAIGHT-RIGHTS LIBERATION MOVEMENT
. And the TV footage slid into Cleve’s head: cops, lights, squad cars, crime-scene tapes, the chanting, bouncing ranks of straights. Cressida looked up at him (her round eyes, her characterless nose, her flat smile), and led him on down Stonewall Place.

Cleve had imagined a little world. A world of Ant-and-Bee innocuousness, of diffident striving and inch-by-inching, with heads down and faces averted and abashed. But he found it chaotic: everywhere there was poverty and prettiness and peril. On the green triangle of Sheridan Square the “Five O’Clock Club” was dispersing; minders bawled and kids rioted. As they moved west through the sidewalk gridlock of prams, pushchairs, buggies, strollers, through smells of dairy, of confectioner, of dime-store perfumier, they passed herds of men drawn to the jaws of bars and taverns, and street-corner youths, loiterers, louts, punks, drunks, assessing Cleve from an unknown vantage of violence and boredom—and he walked on, shaped like a top when it spins, quivering with centrifugal torque.

In New York, in summer, air doesn’t want to be air anymore. It wants to be liquid. Around Christopher Street, this day, it wanted to be solid: a form of food, most probably. Paddling through it, Cleve’s thighs rasped on. They turned right on Bleecker. He looked up. Beyond the lumpen foliage of the ginkgo trees an evening sky lay swathed in its girlish pinks and boyish blues. And the tenement blocks. One-way windows, and the butts of AC units like torn hi-fi speakers, playing churned heat. The smutty fire escapes going
Z, Z, Z
. What are these zees saying, he wondered: sleep, or just the end of the alphabet? She hurried on ahead. With momentous helplessness he followed.

Now he was standing in a basement kitchen. Cleve assumed, at any rate, that it must be a kitchen. Cressida had called it “the kitchen.” A kitchen, to Cleve, was an arena for the free play of delectation, enterprise, and wit. Not the rear end of some desperate holding operation, a field hospital of pots, pails, acids, carbolics, and cauldrons of boiling laundry. “This is meat and potatoes,” he whispered. “Meat and potatoes
tops.”
He couldn’t imagine cooking anything in here. He could imagine having his legs amputated in here. But not cooking … Cressida was in the room across the passage, consulting with another straight broad, her buddy or backup. Cleve waited, listening to the saddest sound he had ever heard. It reminded him of the call of the loons on the river trips he’d gone on, years ago, with Grainge …

And now the baby was there on the kitchen table, being unwrapped as if for his imminent inspection, its hiccupy weeping growing softer, its stained and damp cloth diaper revealing itself beneath the unclasped bodysuit, its arms waving and miming at the bare bulb overhead.

“Would you pass me the powder? And that tub of cream. And that cloth. Not that one. On the faucet. The pink one.”

As he poked warily around among the jars, the pads, the balls of cotton wool, the plastic bottles, the plastic teats, the grime, the biology, Cleve wondered if he had ever suffered so. He could feel self-pity drench his heart: his heart, so deep-encased, so far away.

“Not that one. That one.”

He wondered if he had ever suffered so.

And he wondered what on earth people were going to say.

Twenty-second Street, the apartment, the bedroom: sheets, pillows, a leg here, an arm there. The acidy tang of male love suspended itself in the failing light and alerting air of autumn. Two mustaches stirred and flexed.

The first mustache said, “I mean if it was another man. That I could understand.” This was Irv.

The second mustache said, “That you could fight. You know what you’re dealing with.” This was Orv.

“You know where you stand.”

“You know what’s what.”

“But this …”

“Another man. Okay. It happens. But this …”

“I just feel so unclean.”

“Irv,” said Orv.

“The past. It’s all defiled for me. I feel so …”

“Maybe it’s some kind of midlife thing. A rush of blood. He’ll be back.”

“I could never feel the same about him. Not after this.”

“I saw him in Jefferson Market. He looks two hundred years old. He’s lost his build. He’s even lost his
tone.”

“Do you think he was always that way?”

“Cleve? Jesus. Who knows?”

“It’ll get around.”

“You’re damn right it’ll get around. Where’s my Rolodex.”

“Orv,” said Irv.

“You just think of them
kissing.”

“Get this. He says it’s not her tits and ass he ‘admires.’ It’s her wrists. It’s her collarbone.”

“That really
does
sound straight.”

“He’s coming over for his books Saturday morning. That’s right. He’s moving into that … 
crèche
on Bleecker.”

“Oh, wow.
Cleve
 … of all the guys we hang with. Arn. Harv. Grove. Fraze.”

“But
Cleve.”

“I mean:
Cleve.”

This was Orv.

“I mean:
Cleve.”

This was Irv.

Esquire
, 1995

WHAT HAPPENED TO ME ON MY HOLIDAY

(for Elias Fawcett, 1978–1996)

A
DERBIBLE THING HABBENED
do me on my haliday. A harrible thing, and a bermanend thing. Id won’d be the zame, ever again.