How Long Has This Been Going On (36 page)

Johnna shook her head.

"It's the old Elaine," said Elaine, "or no Elaine at all?"

Johnna said, "It's about choices."

"I'll mull it over. Now let's have more about your boy friend." Inside, she was thinking, I am forty-seven, relatively sure of myself, a success, and ambivalent. I claim valuable things, particularly: my energy, my byline, and my Lois. I have a gift. I have an audience. I have a great new deal with a major house. But if I don't tell all of you what I have learned of the world and its people, no one will ever know: including me.

This is life as Elaine sees it.

At dinner, Jim was telling Henry, "The trouble with you is, you think gay life is a religion. I mean,
really
a religion. Not the going-to-church-on-Sunday-morning-and-forget-it-till-next-week religion, but a
cult.
To everyone else, it's musicals and dressing right and maybe some dating. To you, it's death and rebirth every day of the week."

"It's all that I am," said Henry.

"See?"

At Williams College, where they were both in Psi U, they had been acquaintances, making "mystery loaf' jokes on the dinner line, blithely grousing about calculus, and faking heterosexual frenzy on "road trips" to Bennington. A few years pass. Then, as so often happens, the two meet up on a street in the West Village on a Saturday night. A bit of miscellaneous nostalgia is framed by warm greetings and slightly warmer farewells. Each then thinks, I wonder. Henry notes that Jim was in a black leather jacket; Jim is almost certain he saw Henry staring Very Pointedly at the humpy blond number leaning against a mailbox just before Jim said hello. Theymeet again, this time at the theatre—a revival of
Brigadoon
—but each is with a group and they do little more than wave. But next time they meet in a gay bar, Henry grinning and Jim doing a mock take because now the jig is up, and they clasp hands in a good, solid grip, because this time they are going to work on a very different kind of nostalgia—whom they had crushes on in college, who else
was,
when exactly they themselves knew they were—the conversation, in short, that marks the two men's passing from acquaintances to comrades. One hour of such talk and you can be intimates for life.

Every gay man with a number of gay friends in a big gay city has one person to whom he tells more or less everything. This person is not his lover or roommate; it is more likely someone who lives at some remove, someone you telephone rather than say good morning to, or Who finished the milk? It is, in fact, most often a friend from the past, because he already knows a lot of your secrets, and for Henry it was Jim and for Jim it was Henry. They were well suited: middle-class in background, a year apart in their late twenties, relatively eager players on the burgeoning gay scene, smart, articulate, and good-natured. One completely unimportant difference between them was that Henry was in the arts-and-media world, as an editor on the staff of
Aficionado
magazine, while Jim was an attorney. Also—as Jim kept reminding Henry—Jim was prudent in all things (especially sex), while Henry was a berserker.

"You're going to tear yourself apart someday," Jim was saying, "with this ritualization you make out of the erotic. And that hustler stuff is really... Look, it's a dangerous scene, you know that. What are you looking for with those creatures, anyway?"

"God in Her wisdom tell me, because even I don't know." Fresh out of fries, Henry reached over to take one of Jim's. "And I wish I could figure it out without having to get reamed all the time."

Jim winced. "Doesn't that hurt?"

Henry snatched another fry. "It's more like uncomfortable."

"You know what you could do?" Jim began. Then he stopped, the way people will when they're about to give you advice and want you to agree in advance to take it.

"What could I do?"

"Give Andy Del Vecchio a call. He's such a nice guy, and he has a real case on you."

"Yeah, I know.
Nice."

"What's wrong with nice? Andy would be the perfect lover. He's cute, he's affectionate, he's incredibly loyal."

"What are you selling, a boy friend or a beagle puppy? If he's so fabulous, why hasn't he been snapped up?"

"Fabulous is the
dream
, Henry. You can't live a dream. Anyway—well, take the whole plate if you're that hungry—Andy hasn't been snapped up because he just came out a few months ago."

Henry looked at Jim. "So how do you know so much about him?"

Jim tried on a crooked smile. "I took him home last November."

"And?"

"Well... he mostly talks."

"So I figured."

"He just needs someone to show him the ropes. We don't all start in by raping our college roommate, you know."

"I didn't rape him. We got drunk and he got curious. Besides, if I'm that advanced a sportsman, I should stick with the men who can play at my level. I'm not a teacher, Jim. I'm a gay desperado."

Jim checked his watch. "You coming to the meeting?"

"Let's go."

A young man walks up Third Avenue in the Seventies, trying to master his anxiety. He has taken this walk for the past three nights, each time becoming so unnerved as he reaches his destination that he walks right by it, cursing his risible shyness. At Seventy-ninth Street, he crosses to the west side of the avenue, his feet slowing as he nears Eightieth Street. A few more doors and he's there: Harry's Back East, the gay bar that this man has chosen as the first he will enter in his life. For the fourth time, aching with fear, he walks past it.

Tomorrow, he says.

The Kid was holding a tech run-through in Cafe Tremendo, where he would presently be performing. That evening, in fact, was more or less his opening, though of one of his old acts. He was readying a new one to be unveiled four weeks later, with Heavy Invitations to the press and a summoning of every Major Queen in town.

"Okay," said the Kid, moving a chair from one side of the miniature stage to the other. "This. Yes." He picked up another chair, surveyed the stage, put it down. "All right, forget the chairs," he told the lighting man. "Just pick me up with a spot for the
Camelot
medley, when Bombasta breaks into 'Before I Graze On You Again.' That's the warning for the iris out. I only do sixteen bars, I fade pathetically, and the medley is over. You'll see Bombasta turn upstage in a resigned yet regal pose.
Blackout.
Got it?"

Henry and Jim had wandered in, for Sacred Acts held its meetings in Cafe Tremendo with the indulgence of Paul, a close friend of the cafe's owner.

"Hi," said the Kid. "I'm Jerrett Troy."

"It will be marve, it will be ripping, it will be"—this was Paul, bustling in with shopping bags in tow—"
utterly making.
Say hello to Johnny, boys."

Helios all around.

"Okay, Paul, when does your chum the manager get the piano tuned?" asked the Kid, on the tough side.

"Now, now, Johnny, I knew you when you were hustling—"

"I may have hustled, fat stuff, but you never knew me."

"Please!"

"This guy wants decent talent, he should treat it decently. The piano's a wreck, the lights are a scandal... Yes,
you"
he threw at the lighting man. "And the cook refuses me even a plate of something. I am owed better treatment. Is this my life, Paul?"

"Look around you, Johnny. It's a tiny—"

"He's charging heavy cash for me, isn't he? He's trendy, and I'm one reason why!"

The door crashed open, and everyone turned to look.

"Hi," said Andy. "Sacred Acts?"

"Andy!" said Jim. "Right. So you know Henry. And this is Paul and
that's
Jerrett Troy, the boy wonder of cabaret."

"Hi," said everyone.

"Johnny's running his tech for the show tonight," said Paul, motioning the others to a table as far from the stage as possible, which in Cafe Tremendo was about ten feet. Tremendo was a Village coffeehouse that had gone theatrical, upping its prices while paying the help in food and the performers in exposure. It was a delicate economy, selling the avant-garde at a discount and counting on the artists' need to be heard simply to break even. No one ran a cafe theatre for the money. Paul's friend wasn't anyone's idea of a good time, but—do him justice—he put it together and he kept it together for subsistence profits, simply because someone had to or the gay world wouldn't have any art besides Tennessee Williams plays and Joshua Logan musicals.

"Sigh," said Paul, taking out his notebook as they all sat. "Should we wait for the others?"

"Andy," said Henry, "it's nice to see a new face here. Are you planning to become permanent?"

"Well, I... I guess."

Jezebel paraded in and threw off his overcoat to reveal a jumpsuit and a feather boa.

"Do I or don't I?" he purred. "That
is
the question."

"I know that butt," said the Kid, behind him.

Whirling, Jezebel cried, "Look who's in town! The Mad Duchess of Telegraph Hill!"

They rushed to each other, but, just short of the promised raucous embrace, all they shared was a solid handshake.

"Good to see you, Johnny," said Jezebel warmly, dropping his ghetto intonation.

"You with this group?"

"Yeah, we're going to mash the rules up a bit here."

Martin arrived, still in the suit he had worn to work as a junior vice president in an architectural firm.

"Wow, that sailor," Martin told Henry, drawing up a chair. "Actually," he added to Andy, who was gaping a little, "just a boy in a sailor suit." Back to Henry: "Well, the great thing was, he lived only a block away from the bar, so I went right back after, and that guy from the Red Party was there. Remember?"

"The Red Party?" Paul asked. Something else he got left out of.

"Two in one night?" said Jim. "Martin, are you going for a record, or what?"

Martin looked bewildered. "
Two
is a record?"

"Martin," Henry told Jim, "is our Gold Medalist in cruising."

"I've heard of people spending a whole night at the baths and doing something or other with a slew of people while they were drugged out of their mind," Jim replied. "I've
heard
of it, I mean, the way you hear of the Lost City of the Incas or something. But surely it isn't—"

"Two
is a
record?"

"I look around," said Paul. "And all I see is youths. Isn't somebody here at least thirty?"

"I might be thirty-three," said Jezebel. "But who can tell age on a black people?"

The three women in Sacred Acts always arrived (and left) together, as they did now. Dorothy was tall and angular with a lilting southern accent; Tatiana was Ukrainian and supposedly had a great sense of humor that none of the men had ever seen the slightest shred of; and blond, overweight little Cora wore her hair plaited into the longest braid in the Western world. All three were serious about feminism and oblivious of everything else.

"Here come the Andrews Sisters," said Jezebel. "Pull up the love seat, ladies. I gots the BarcaLounger."

The women settled in, and Dorothy gently said, "Last time, we were discussing the use of social means to better our relations with the police department. Cora has prepared an agenda, and will now share it with us."

"Uh-oh," said Jezebel. "This gone be as long as
War and Peace."

"It
is
war," said Dorothy.

"And you a piece," Jezebel snapped back. "Pretty piece, too, don't think I ain't notice."

Cora and Tatiana looked questioningly at Dorothy, who shook her head: No, we won't walk out yet.

"Actually," Henry put in, as two other men came in and joined the group. "We've got some pretty lively ideas already here. Paul suggests a basketball game in the—"

"All-male, of course," said Dorothy.

"Well, the police are all-male."

"My point exactly," said Dorothy.

"How about a dance?" said the Kid, coming over. "You want to loosen up the relations, you move to music."

"A dance!" said Henry.
"That's
what we'll ask the police to!"

"That's it!" Martin put in.

"Maybe you should choose a club song, too," the Kid suggested. "I recommend 'Night and Day.'" He sang a sample for them:

Dwight is gay,

So is his son...

"Cora will present her agenda now," said Dorothy.

"If Cora would present her hair to the pillow industry," said the Kid, "an entire generation of geese would breathe a whole lot easier."

"That is a chauvinist comment," said Cora, instinctively touching her braid.

"Look, Rapunzel—"

"Shut up, Johnny!" Paul cried. "Go back to your rehearsal!"

"His master's voice," said the Kid, shrugging as he made himself scarce.

Cora and Tatiana looked questioningly at Dorothy: No, not yet.

"A dance would be neat," said Jim. "We'd attract a lot of business, that's for sure."

"Yeah," said Henry. "Can you imagine selling tickets to a basketball game?"

"Where do we hold it?" asked Paul.

Henry said, "How about Kingdom Come? It's at least half gay as it is, and it's gay-owned."

"Really?"

"Well, gay-managed. No one really knows who owns the places we go to."

"It's the Italian boys, isn't it?" said Martin, as Andy reddened.

"Was that true back in the old days, Paul?" Henry asked.

Thrilled to be given the chance to expound, Paul managed to get out "Well" when Dorothy interrupted with "This is another male-oriented activity."

"Dancing?" said Jim.

"The men will dance with men, won't they?"

"So? The women—"

"What women? Ah,
yes,
you see? These festivities are always set up for, run by, and attended by men."

"What are they supposed to invite the police to?" the Kid called over from the stage. "A quilting bee?"

Cora and Tatiana looked questioningly at Dorothy, and Dorothy nodded.
Now.

"Thank you so much," said Dorothy as the three women rose, "for another sympathetic meeting of the genders."