How Long Has This Been Going On (35 page)

"I don't go with straight kids."

"Other guys make me," says Eric, complacently.

"That's why I told you, Always come to me. Kid like you loose on the streets, getting into all kinds of... Move your arm. Right. There you go."

Erie shifted a bit, then settled his head on Frank's chest. Stroking Eric's hair, Frank said, "If you were gay, I'd sure take you for a ride. But fair is fair."

"Frank? Do you know about a job that I could get?"

"Sixteen, no experience, and—sorry—not the smartest guy in sight?"

"I'm seventeen."

"I'll ask around."

"Frank," Eric went on, taking hold of the big guy, heavy pleading, genuine distress, "please, please help me."

"I will, okay?"

"Frank." Holding on.

"Look, I told you, right? So stop sighing or I'll screw your ass."

"I just wish I could be like you."

"The hell you say."

"Because you're so independent. With your own place, for instance, and if you feel like breakfast, you just dish it up no matter what the clock says."

Eric snuggled up closer to Frank, who growled, "Stop trying to get me hot for you."

"I'm not. Anyway, you are hot now. I can tell."

"Yeah?" Frank took Eric's hand under the blanket and guided it down for a tour. "You ready to take that up your tail?"

"Come on," said Eric with adolescent bravado. "You couldn't get that up the Lincoln Tunnel."

"I'll say one thing for you, you don't scare easy."

"You scare me? Come on, you're this big cream puff."

"Well, three creeps lying unconscious on Eleventh Avenue don't think so."

"What does that mean?"

"That means I went over to my buddy Gordon Niles's place on my break tonight, to pick up his house keys so I can feed his cats while he's in Key West next weekend. Coming back, I turned the corner on Eleventh and saw three guys with a baseball bat jumping two leather boys."

Eric whistled, No kidding!

"Right. Well, I'm not about to walk away from that, so I did a little jumping on my own. Those fuckers were so happy in the act of cornering their victims they didn't hear me coming up behind them. They're shouting away. They're like... like vampires. 'We're going to kill you faggots!' Suddenly I've got the bat from them and I'm doling it out. First one in the stomach, second sharp on the knees—boy, does he scream—third on the side. Down they go, a perfect strike."

"Are they dead?"

"I doubt it. But sure as shit those guys have something in them leading them to kill. Tonight it was gays. Tomorrow it's blacks. I say, Kill them first. Then the only ones who die are the ones who deserve to."

"What did the gay guys do?"

"Took off like rabbits."

"You're making this up."

"Sure I am."

After a pause, Eric said, "My brother does that. With his friends. Going after gay guys. They call it 'hunting.'"

"So do we."

"Boy."

"There's this war going on," Frank explained. "But one side doesn't know it. Hunting, right. Hunt them from their jobs and their apartments. Deny them. Jail them. And, for the sportsmen among you, hold a miniature Tet Offensive with baseball bats on Eleventh Avenue."

Frank grunted. "Had a dear friend," he said. "He was murdered in Central Park last year by your brother and his friends. Great guy, he was—smart and funny and generous. A man like that leaves a hole in your being that you never refill. Why's he dead? Defending his country? Battling a fire? He's dead for somebody's
fun!
"

Eric was asleep.

Frank gently moved the kid to the side to give himself some room. Yeah, he'll find the boy a job, and he'll see about getting him a place to stay in, maybe share the rent with some good-humored gay guy with a spare couch. Frank will work on it, though he's got a lot on his mind as it is. He has the Failure of Frank to ponder. He hears the history meter ticking away while he dicks around tending bar and amounting to nothing more than being one of the town's most essential lays. He has middle age to face; once, he had planned to have made Captain by then. Captain Frank the Cop.

What is he instead? He'd say,
Nothing;
but he's wrong. Frank is the Saint of Christopher Street.

Elaine was early. Her editor's assistant had called to reschedule the lunch date from one o'clock to one-thirty, and Elaine said fine. But she couldn't bring herself to accommodate any change in plans, having spent over aweek revving up for this day, deciding when she would get up, what she would breakfast upon, when she would start dressing, and how she would enter the Russian Tea Room.

"Abashedly," she said, miming for Lois how that would look, "as if to present the writer at bay amid the fleshpots?"

Or: "Guardedly, out of fear that that close a relationship with one's publishers must impair one's freedom in negotiating the next contract?"

Then: "Commandingly, as the purveyor of chic, bittersweet romances for women, regally condescending to my cult as I enter the temple of luncheon?"

"Fancy stuff," said Lois. "Just do it."

Elaine had had a number of literary lunches in the past, but never one this grand. When her first novel,
A Woman of Some Renown,
was accepted, in 1960, the aging editor had asked Elaine to a quietly pleasant French restaurant in the East Thirties; and they met again in the same place to celebrate the salutary reviews. "You have been
beautifully
launched," the editor told Elaine. With no agent and no writer friends to advise her, Elaine had no idea how to shape her career, but her editor encouraged Elaine's knack for the spinning of stylish yarns about attractive women prospering as they juggled their romantic and professional lives. Her second and third books were in fact entitled
How She Prospered
and
Love and Money.

I'm trendy, Elaine told herself as all this was going on, not without relish. It's amusing to think of oneself as taking the pulse of a readership. I know everything, Elaine gloated.

"Why do you always tell who made the clothes and the sheets and the cigarettes?" Lois asked. "A sheet is a sheet, no?"

"My readers like to read
la dolce vita's
labels."

Elaine made a turn with her fourth—the present—book.
Me and Mister Right
incorporated a new and bolder Elaine into the fashionable popcorn Elaine; and she had changed publishing houses. She had been stolen, even: through a letter that, neither euphemistically nor playfully but resolutely, scorning any who would think it ethically questionable, praised Elaine's work and offered her a place in a more prestigious and high-powered house "should you ever want a divorce from your present publishers."

"They really like you" was Lois's very satisfied observation.

"It's lovely to be lured," said Elaine; and she went for it. The much higher advance that her new house offered—on the basis of an outline and the first chapter—enabled Elaine and Lois to turn their savings into a mortgage on a country place. Moreover, Elaine felt a bit relieved to abandon her old house, a tweedy place whose editors were all in their sixties. Her new house had an air of youth and daring, as did her new editor, Johnna Roberts: trim and quick and tense and pretty, with evaluating eyes.

Lois would go for that, Elaine thought, the first time she and Johnna met.

But Johnna was very much a hands-on editor, Elaine discovered. Her former editor had given her absolute freedom, but Johnna, upon receiving the manuscript, sent Elaine a series of letters mistrusting and disputing what Elaine had written, as in "Chapter 4—I don't know what any of these people look like," or "p 183—Won't yr readers loathe daughter's bitter tone?"

She's a good editor, Elaine reckoned. I can see that in her keenness for detail. But she is encircling me, and she is incorrect. Chapter 4—You can tell what these people look like by the way the other characters treat them and speak of them. And p 183—Many a mother has stubbornly earned and thus deserved her daughter's bitterness.

Three books were wish-fulfillment. The fourth one will be documentary.

That, of course, was what this lunch was to be about. New author and editor, new book, new turn in the career. Which way does she go?

"You be the judge," Elaine told Lois, twirling at the front door to show off her outfit.

"Chick, you're
punishment!"

"The blouse is virtuous, the skirt determined, and the coat"—as she put it on—"is arrogant."

"That's it," Lois approved. "The whole nine yards."

"I shall travel by cab," said Elaine, taking up her green tartan scarf, "for that touch of omnipotence. Oh!" She turned to Lois. "You don't think the scarf is concessive?"

"What do you mean?" cried Lois, who had given it to Elaine one Christmas. "That's cashmere!"

Elaine smiled. "Of course."

"Go on, you goof."

In the doorway, Elaine paused. "How long has it been?"

"Don't mawk at me!"

"Just say, because I'm certain you know."

"Nineteen and a half years."

Elaine blew a kiss and Lois snorted.

Celebrity, in New York, often favors anonymity, and how to enter the Russian Tea Room, Elaine decided, was artlessly. She was shown to oneof the front tables—ominous, she thought, as these were the A-list seats and this meant that Elaine's new editor really did have a lot of power.

Oh, well. As long as she had nothing to do but wait, Elaine munched on black bread and scrutinized the company. She saw fame, money, style—exactly what she had been writing about for three novels. Inside one minute, before her gaze passed two television newscasters, a legendary stage actress in foxtails, a splendid-looking couple muttering their way through the fight of their lives, a man so important he employed two bodyguards, one fore and one aft, and a young woman apparently named Snow. At the end of that minute, Johnna Roberts appeared, unapologetically late—another sign of the powerful. Elaine asked for potage Saint-Germain and blinis with caviar, and she had poppy-seed cake in mind for dessert; Johnna was content with some light salad thing, yet further evidence that she had clout and used it because she Knew What Things Were.

But even the people who run the world can't control it, and Johnna started right in on her infuriating boy friend. Books she knew; love she messed up somewhat, it seemed.

"It's familiar," she explained, "but it's incredible. You wouldn't dare try it in a book. Worldly older woman and transparent young man. So it's all about sex, but what isn't?"

"Politics isn't," said Elaine. "Music isn't. Train sets aren't."

"Too real," said Johnna, giving Elaine a once-over. "So your novel. Let's talk."

Elaine took a guess. "You don't like the lesbian sequence."

"I don't dislike it. It worries me, though." "Ah."

"Do you want to be beloved or bold?"

"Neither, actually," said Elaine, dipping into her soup.

"Everyone in fiction is one or the other. It's better if you choose it yourself. Anyway, your first three novels were all..."

"Girl gets boy."

"I meant the style."

"Romantic, carefree, upmarket?"

"Yes."

"Suddenly this one," Elaine went on, "is uncertain yet determined. Ambivalent nevertheless ever so hungry. Comic, yes, but psychotically so."

"Dark,
is how I'd put it. Your readers are used to a sunnier view of the world. Long engagement in heavenly apartments with heroines named

Francesca who own sets of Le Creuset cookware in blaze, or whatever they call that shade of orange.... And now—"

"It's about sex."

"And everyone's named Grimma and their kitchens are all pots and pans. This isn't the book you outlined. Even the pages you showed us have been totally rewritten. Nobody has parents or an address." Johnna shook her head as if dazed. "What color is their hair, even? Where have they been?"

"It is not of concern," said Elaine. "I have caught my characters at the moment of decision in their lives. Where they have been doesn't matter. It's solely a question of where they are going." There was a pause. "It's about choices."

Johnna considered this.

"Tell me about your boy friend," Elaine said. "How young?"

"Much too."

"How transparent?"

"Selfish and deceitful. A little light-fingered, too."

"He
steals?"

"Little things. Candy bars and comic books."

"How young did you say?"

"He's a drama student. Who ever knows how old they are? And who knows why I'm doing this? He's just... very... seductive. You know that way some men have of focusing on you as if they were a camera and you're the movie? Closing in?"

"Well, I've been with Alicia for so long now that I must have forgotten."

"Alicia? The woman who sometimes answers the telephone?"

"Yes."

"Wonderful name—like one of your characters."

"I really do think," said Elaine, "that most women only pretend to be startled by women who... 'love women,' I believe, is the hardy old term for it. They wonder about it, just as a few lesbians wonder about men. So if I slip a lesbian into my novel, I think my readers will be more intrigued than anything else."

"Actually, I wasn't worried about startling anyone. I'm just asking if it's fair to treat lesbianism as a... sequence."

"Thank you," Elaine murmured, as the waiter took away her soup plate.

"Your first three books were bewitching. I have to use the word."

"All those Francescas were bewitching, and I was their puppet," Elaine said. After a moment, she added, "It's a good book, isn't it? This one?"

"We don't say good or bad about books. We say, It reads well."

"Does it?"

Johnna looked dead-on at Elaine. "In my opinion, this book will not sell well in its present form. I would want a major rewrite, sequence and all. I would like to see the elegance and charm restored. Of course, we have to consider that you may prefer it the way it is, which would put us in a very awkward position."

"Because if I was adamant about it," Elaine asked, "you wouldn't want to publish it?"