How Long Has This Been Going On (50 page)

"Elaine?" She knocked again. "I don't hear the music, Elaine! Please turn the music on!" Waiting, listening for it. Then: "Elaine, I need you to talk to me now! We've grown so close, then you shy away. It scares me at what I might do to you."

"I'm calling the police," said Elaine, calmly.

"Oh, no,
please."
Wheedling. "You mustn't." Forceful. "I only want to hear your sweet music, Elaine." Coy, now. She's really nuts. "It's as if we were having coffee and tiny sandwiches at some posh Elaine-Denslow-sort-of place, discussing art nouveau, yet all I would think about is your body, Elaine, lying next to me."

Something was going on outside the door, some scratching or rubbing against the wood.

"I've had you on the page, Elaine, uhmm, yes. You're so available. You're forming a club, Elaine. The sorority of secret women. You may not—"

"What in the bleeding Herkimer is going on here?"
said Lois, in the hall.

Elaine sprang to the door and pulled it open. "Save me!" she said.

Lois looked from Elaine to the women who's always there.

"All right, bangs," says Lois to the stranger. "What's this gig?"

Lois advances a pace, and the woman retreats. But her eyes—her face—reads, I'm not giving up. I am here. I read Elaine.

"Elaine and I," she says, "must make our beautiful music."

"Not on my carpet, you won't," says Lois, walking into the apartment. Holding the door and looking at the woman in the hall, she adds, "One more noise and I come out and kick a hole in you."

That was that. Elaine fell into Lois's arms, saying, "One, you are so handy, and, two, we have to move."

Lois enjoyed hearing Elaine praise Lois's valor, but she'd date a man rather than admit it. "I turn my back on you for one hour, and you've got women fucking our front door."

Lois walked to the mail pile, to pore and consider. "Hmm. Con Ed's overdue. Didn't you promise to—"

"I will, my king, I solemnly attend, but
please
can we think about how terrifying life has become? I mean, just—"

"Lord & Taylor?"

"I've an account now. Such lovely lines in Senior Misses."

"This bill is perfumed!"

"Lois, I want to get out of this city and we have to talk."

Lois thought it over a bit. "Was that one of your readers?"

"It would seem so."

"She likes your stuff so much she wants to..." Lois made a risqué little motion of the tongue.

"That and more, I fancy."

"Aren't they supposed to write through your publisher?"

"She probably did, and I never realized how..."

"...deeply she was—"

"Yes, affected by what I managed to slip in about women loving women. I guess, after all, that you can only find us in fiction. In theatre, we don't exist. In movies, we're witches. Suddenly, there we are on the page, fair and true, and a lady goes ape to see her world affirmed."

"Magazines and bills," said Lois, finishing off the mail. "She'll be back, you know."

"I can be in Sea Cliff in two hours."

"She'll find you there, too, Miss. She wants contact. I saw."

"Lois, can't we move?
Have
we to be here indefinitely?"

Lois shrugged, then stopped, caught by something. "Chick," she said, "your books are that heavy?"

"It's not about heavy, it's about
honest.
Everyone's been lying about homos and lesbians for so long that even a veiled truth here and there can be incredibly energizing. I just... No,
what
is it?" Elaine thought.
"Yes.
I want to grow young. I need to see somewhere else and feel new again.

Somewhere totally novel to me. Mountains, dire swampland, suspicious locals."

"Where did you have in mind?" said Lois, smiling.

"Oh, that's how I especially like you. When you let me tell what I'm thinking of."

Ty said, "Maybe I'm just this vagabond kind of guy, can't be pinned down."

"Bull doody," said Chris.

Ty sighed, then grinned. "Here I am, taking you out for a lovely afternoon. It's Ty, it's spring, it's Central Park going way green for us. And you're not impressed."

Chris sighed, too, leaning back to look around them. They were sitting in the large crescent of grass in the center of the Rambles, and—though Chris had never heard anything about it before—it was clear that this was one of those meeting places that gays mysteriously mark out for themselves. All about were men, especially young men better-looking than they should be. They were athletic, but less in a recreational than a gymmy way, and their clothes seemed so... well,
aptly
chosen. They didn't look like guys taking it easy. They looked like models on a shoot.

"How come we're here and not somewhere else?" Chris asked.

Ty shrugged.

"I'm always here," Chris complained.

"Said you'd never been here before."

"Not physically. And why do you keep vanishing and then—"

"Because I always want more of you, darlin'."

Ty tried a combination or two of his various smiles, but Chris wanted information. This Ty could not give, because, frankly, he simply didn't know what impelled him. He reminds me of something I saw out on the beach at the Pines one summer: a great rough mutt of a dog who had laid claim to a piece of driftwood, which it would plop down in front of you. The dog would then bark insistently till you got up and threw the wood into the ocean for the dog to retrieve. Trotting back with the wood clamped between its jaws, it would drop the wood in front of the very next person sitting on the beach, and start over. In this manner it traversed the strand—yet, every so often, that dog would stop in an almost pensive way, look among the people it had already connected with, and trot back with the wood to urge someone to throw it a second, even a third, time.

That was Ty, eager to collect many fans, always worried that their passion might prove perfunctory. Always, Ty must test; and sometimes he fails. Johnna Roberts, for instance, never took a call from Ty again, and once, when he stopped by her apartment building and buzzed up, she told the doorman to get rid of him.

"How do I look?" said Chris, lying on her back, her head to the side, away from the sunlight. "Am I splendid in the grass?"

She's pretty darn okay, Ty thought, her hair flopping around and her eyes alight, and the tops of her very pretty breasts sort of strong and peeking out to say, Taste me. Ty was stirred; but a shadow passed over them, and Chris, glancing up, said, "You were at Kingdom Come last Saturday."

"Here," said Henry, handing her a flyer. "In case you want to stand with us to fight bigotry, oppressive laws, and the rest of the American way."

"Oh, a demonstration," said Chris, sitting up to examine the flyer. She's a veteran now. "Gay Liberation? That's my favorite kind." Ty was reading over her shoulder. Chris asked, "Do you welcome straights on the line?"

"You're not..."

"A lesbian. No. I'm sort of a gay man manqué. The right interests but the wrong biology."

Ty chuckled.

"A fellow traveler," said Chris, bold with her terminology. She smiled at Henry. "Hey, join us."

Henry looks around, checking out the lawn of sunbathers and conversationalists. A few loners reading the paper, a couple resting up from Frisbee, someone giving someone else a back rub.

"No," said Henry. "I've got a time problem." He's restless, tired of the whole thing. It's late in the day, no one cares—some of the men here simply laughed at him when they saw the flyer—and Henry has Blue in tow. Blue didn't laugh at the flyer: He shrugged, saying, "What's that gonna get you, man?"

Blue's sitting on a bench up by the main walkway, Thinking the Whole Thing Over. Henry's a good guy. He's got a nice place, small but comfortable. Good eating there, too; and the beer never runs out. Good beer, too, some German kind. Henry doesn't ask anything of you except sex, and with Blue you never have to ask in the first place. It's a good deal all around.

So why is the Whole Thing becoming a drag?

"Henry is serious," says Blue aloud, watching Henry as he approaches, head bowed and flyers largely wasted. "He is a very serious Henry."

Henry's idea of Blue is more textured: beautiful, obliging, exotic, amusing, full of pain that he so fiercely hides that he comes off to strangers as shallow. After that woebegone Andy, Blue is electric; but he's hidden. The sex is fine. It's not Henry's scene, exactly, but Henry has adapted to it; and, after climax, Blue waxes loving and humorous, and somehow this astounds Henry. Think of it: a Wild Boy growing fond.

So why is the Whole Thing beginning to feel unnecessary?

"Looks like no one's taking to yer papers," says Blue as Henry joins him on the bench.

"No one's around when you start a movement," Henry explains. "Twenty years from now, we'll be such a multitude there'll be a schism a week."

"Schism," Blue repeats.

"A division. A sundering."

"Yeah, they get cast asunder and suchlike in the Bible."

Henry looks at Blue.

"It might be time for our Blue to hit the road," Blue offers in a speculative manner, to see what Henry says to that.

Henry says nothing.

"Always been my intention to see up the world," Blue goes on. "Only been to West Virginia and New York so far. Thinking maybe of doing a spot of California, you know?"

Henry smiled wearily at Blue. "I bet you'd fit in wonderfully. You're Cal colors, aren't you? Yellow and gold. Smooth and young and almost carefree."

Henry looked at the lawn of gay folk, none of whom would take the slightest notice of the gay-lib demonstration he was promoting.

"What do you mean, 'almost'?" said Blue.

"It'll be fine," Jim told Eric, as they waited for the train to Sayville to take off. "Just don't talk a lot. Wait till
he
tells you what he wants from a boy. Then you fit into that."

"What am I, an actor?" Eric fumed.

Frank came into the car, and Eric waved him over, looking like a puppy about to tumble into his master's lap.

"The young man is up for a houseboy job in the Pines," Jim explained, as Frank joined them. "You know that palace they were building all last summer, way down toward Water Island? The one shaped like a giant Hershey's Kiss? That's the place."

"'The Witch's Tit,'" said Frank. So the locals had dubbed it. "What's this guy like, besides rich?"

"He's a gent," said Jim.

Frank waited for a more explicit answer. He'd known many a gent to do unspeakable things to a kid like Eric.

"He's a good guy," Jim added. "A big wheel at the Joffrey Ballet and so on. He and Henry's older brother went to college together."

Frank nodded noncommittally.

"Don't worry, we've been screening them. Martin kept coming up with one velvet monster after another, but this one's legitimate."

"Yeah, if he pulls out the rubber mask and the handcuffs," Eric muttered, "I'm splitting."

Jim patted his shoulder. "I'll take you to my house first. If you're unhappy, come back to me and we'll put you up on the couch."

Frank liked that, guys looking out for each other. "There's always got to be a way out," he said. "A choice."

As the train pulled out of the station, Jim noted the attention they were getting from the other beach-bound gay men. It was a Friday-evening train in early June, with a heavy contingent of males wearing their ruts into the traditional route of the two trains, the van to the ferry slip, the boat over the bay to the Pines or Cherry Grove, and the exuberant arrival in a sandy ghetto without laws or clothing. To the professional gays like Frank and Henry and Martin, the men who worked only to amortize their leisure, who spent hours in the gym perfecting their appeal, and who spent winter waiting for summer and summer waiting for the weekend, the beach represented a fantasy made real. To the less devoted, like Jim, the fantasy was more glimpsed than experienced. To pass a prince in trunks on the boardwalk and nod hello was, to such as Frank, an invitation to the dance. To Jim, it was a highlight of the stay.

"I'm out for the whole two weeks," said Jim, enjoying the way the other guys in the car were staring at them and whispering. "A bagful of books, a clutch of
Times
recipes, and me, that's the trip."

"You've got the two muscle queens with the same name in your house, right?"

"Billy and Bill. They're ideal housemates. They're almost never around except to nap and sleep. What are you up to?"

Frank smiled. "I'm making a movie."

"What, a travelogue?"

"Sort of."

"I'm making a movie, too," said Eric. "It's about this heebie-jeebie boy who goes nuts and wrecks all the teepees in the Indian village. Yeah. So then he mocks the authorities and they try to throw him in jail. But he won't go, see? He's a runaway boy."

"Is that how you're going to talk at this rich guy's house?" said Frank. "Because forget it, okay?"

"Maybe he'll like it," said Jim. "I do."

There was little conversation after that. Frank read the
News,
Jim pulled out a paperback of
City of Night,
and Eric looked out the window. By the time they hit the ferry dock, Frank had fallen into company with some men Jim didn't know, and the trio broke up, Jim and Eric heading into the belly of the boat and Frank sitting on the roof to brave the heavy spray and watch the white of the houses gradually dot the trees as the boat approached the harbor.

Halfway across the bay, Eric came up and found Frank sitting alone. Eric said, "If I throw myself in the water, will you save me and take me home forever?"

"I'm no good for you, youngster."

"Sure you are. Why not?"

"Because I'm trash, okay?"

"No, you're some hero guy who rescues everyone."

"You're wrong about that, and I should know." The dog on the quicksand. "I don't rescue anybody, I just fuck around. You need some solid guy who'll give you ambition and a way to believe in yourself. That's why Jim is taking you out here. He's an upstanding guy."

"Yeah, he's okay," said Eric vaguely.