How Long Has This Been Going On (68 page)

"He's very class-conscious," Luke agreed.

"It's not about class," said Tom. "It's about style. I know that kind of guy. Fancy-dan, no line of work, just sex and sleeping till what hour and wearing T-shirts to everything and that stupid redneck way of talking, which happens to drive me crazy."

"Walt
could
do better, actually," said Luke.

"What did you have in mind?" asked Chris.

"Well, how about someone like me," said Tom, "who worked his butt off building a business—which is more than can be said for you rising-above-it college types. Or, tell me, Luke, who pays the mortgage on the house while you're doing all that folderol with your catering?" Now to Chris: "And all you do is put on plays and have fun."

"Who runs the house chores?" Luke countered, mildly. "Who does the cooking with a serene professional touch?"

"Who crams your ass till even you stop begging for more?"

"Boys, boys," said Chris.

"For that matter, catering is a service industry," Luke went on, stirring milk and sugar into his coffee. "It's no different from construction." Now he slipped into his deep-voiced imitation of Tom. " And will you
please
stop banging that damn spoon around in that damn—'"

"All of this is beside the point," said Tom. "The point is Walt, because he's worrying me. Demonstrations and zaps and..." He looked at Luke. "Tell her."

Luke sort of grimaced, but he told her: "Walt got arrested. An AIDS march got out of hand."

"Good for him!"

"Chris!" said Tom. "That is
not
good!"

"You don't admire his commitment?"

"How do you think I feel when he lights into me, asking me how come

I pretended to be straight? Calls me a hypocrite, too. Didn't I practically raise him?"

"Maybe Blue will soften that side of him," said wise Chris. "Blue is not too keen on the issues, I'd say."

"You know him?" asked Luke.

"I meet him now and again at Johnny's. He's sort of a nonfunctioning houseboy there—has been, for as long as anyone remembers. Those two go way back."

"Well, that doesn't surprise me, anyway," said Tom. "That piece of trash has been fucking since he was eight."

"Tom's met Blue," said Luke. "Walt brought him back after a dance. I was working the Donnell party that night, so I missed it all, and of course Tom had nothing to say about it."

"What is there to say? He's trash and that's it."

Luke shrugged: It takes all kinds, including not only Blue but Tom.

Chris said, "Is there another slice of that cake with the... Oh, chivalry!"—because both men had jumped up to serve her. "Thank you." To Luke: "Did you really just
make
this?"

"Flour, eggs, almonds, cherries," said Luke.

Chris tasted, gave a little thrill, threw up her head, and cried,
"Incroyable!"

"I don't think it's so terrible that Walt is political," said Luke.

"He's too relentless, though," Tom replied.

"Maybe we should all watch our politics nowadays. Did anyone see the TV program a few weeks ago about the White Aryans? On that afternoon show that follows—"

"Some of us are at work at that time."

"Tom, will you give it a break?"

Tom looked at Chris, and she shrugged a good, solid, midwestern he's-right-so-you-shut-up shrug; and Tom did.

"I mean," Luke went on, "these guys are really Nazis. They show you what hatred looks like. They don't disdain anyone different from them, they want to
kill
anyone different from them. They're so on fire that a fight broke out right on the show, real-life stuff. You should have seen the twisted faces. All right, they're a lunatic fringe, but they're killers. Killers, Tom."

"Well, golly, they're not my fault, are they?"

"They're not your target, either." To Chris: "He actually calls himself a Republican."

Appalled, Chris turned to fix Tom with perhaps the one gaze in all the world that he couldn't face down.

"It's a matter of taxes," said Tom. "Nothing else."

"It's a matter of women's rights," Chris replied. "And fighting racism. And preventing gay men from being beaten to death in the street for sport. It most surely is not a matter of taxes!"

"Whose side are you on, Tom?" Luke added.

"Damn the both of you!"
Tom shouted.

There was a silence; Luke broke it. "He and I made it a rule a long time ago," he told Chris, "never to talk politics."

"Never to challenge your preconceptions?" Chris replied—to Tom, mainly. "Never to consider your obligations to others?"

Tom was silent, watching her.

"The problem with you middle-class gay guys is, you pass for white. You move to the metropolitan gay centers, and you're more or less closeted—'private,' you'd call it—when you step outside the ghetto. You assimilate yourselves, and suddenly you've got property to protect and money invested. I ask you, what impelled the militants of the civil rights movement of the sixties? You know what impelled them? They had nothing to lose. That's how they could brave the police dogs and the fire hoses. Even torture and death. Could you have done that?"

"You're as bad as Walt," Tom grumped.

"Walt is
good."

"White Aryans," said Luke. "Such an insistent name."

Chris was still staring at Tom. He tried a smile and asked, "What's new on the David J. Henderson front?"

Chris shrugged: Nothing's new, he still appreciates me for the wrong reasons.

"Well," said Tom, "are you in love with him?"

"I might be."

"Light love, very-truth love, or die-without-benefit-of-the-touch-of-him love?" asked Luke.

"Hard to say."

"Light love, you feel like the heroine of a musical comedy. Very-truth, you turn pastel colors at the mention of his name but do not evaporate if he rejects you."

"And what's the last one?"

"You evaporate."

"I'm going to establish a new category, where you aren't mad for any of

the candidates, but you have to vote for
somebody.
Meanwhile, what kind of love are you two in?" Tom looked over at Luke.

"It's tricky to classify," Luke returned, "when you've been in it all your life."

Chris nodded. "It's funny to think of us lasting all this while together. Do you... do ever think back to the old days?" "Sometimes," said Luke. "Never," said Tom.

"I get very caught up in my work," said Chris. "During pre-production and rehearsal, there's only the play. It opens. And before the next one starts, there's a little space in there of vapid peace. J. likes me best then. It's the only time, he says, when I most truly get into the sex—because I'm not distracted by anything. He's wrong—because that's when I go back to our memories. I go back to that purity. That fantasy. That time of knowing that we could only go higher from here."

"That time," added Luke, "when we made our choices. We invented our liberty."

"That time when you both were so cruel to me," said Tom, "that I still could gladly kill you both."

After a moment, Chris asked Luke, "Is he like that in bed, too?," and Luke replied, "Even better."

I must intrude here to express a certain curiosity about how our once so dynamic Luke has, to quote Congreve, dwindled into a wife.

Yes, I say it.
Wife.
He runs the house, masterminds the food, turns the empathic ear upon Tom's occasional rants, gives more forgiveness than he gets, and seems content to let all the great events in his life be Tom's events.

Let's let Luke himself tell how he came to be so humbled:

I majored in English Lit at Berkeley, partly because I didn't know
what
to major in, but also to please my parents, because they were such big readers. I tell you, a book a day.
Each.
So it shouldn't surprise that I do the same. Feet up, a bowl of warm-washed apples, and something to read.
Ragtime.
Oz books. That Gaddis novel that no one else got through; I'll get through it.

But you want to know how I ended up living in Tom's shadow. He's the master, you feel. He works; I cater. Listen. There are no wives in gay marriages. Anyway, Tom is very easy to get along with as long as the house runs itself; and I never wanted anything but this. What was I supposed to hope for, a political career? The law? I have no talents. Look, this is my life: I wake at whim, chore around a bit, chide the defiant Walt if he's handy, then stretch out in the backyard listening to Puccini. And so on. Wouldn't you like a schedule that easy? That's life as I see it.

Auntie MacAssar, with the aid of Maestro Fleshgobaldi, has dropped a libido enhancer into Suspicia Pushmore's cup at the tea party welcoming St. John Lord Ramsbottom to Riverrun. Luring the other guests out of the room on the pretext of wanting to display her lovely new set of doilies illustrating scenes from the life of Admiral Zumwalt, Auntie leaves Lord Ramsbottom alone with Suspicia. As the aphrodisiac takes hold, Suspicia helplessly begins loosening Lord Ramsbottom's tie, then fondling his crotch, and, at last, ferociously tearing his clothes off and falling upon him—-just as Auntie leads the ladies of the Riverrun Tea and Tatting Sodality back into the room. Whereupon the humiliated Suspicia and the bewildered Lord Ramsbottom abandon the stage to the first-act finale, "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood," as Auntie—once again the invincible queen of all her survey—directs a chorus in praise of suburban life.

"No," Chris called up from the fifth row. "No, hold the music. That button business isn't working. Fay!" The actress playing Suspicia came out from the wings, followed by the Lord Ramsbottom, David J. "The button stuff is too aggressive," Chris went on. "She's doing this
in spite of herself.
It's what she wants to do but doesn't dare to do."

"It's his buttons," Fay explained. "They're, like, you can't get them open easily."

"The laundry went wild with the starch again," said David.

"Neville?" asked Chris, turning to her costume designer.

"I'll resew them. Give you more maneuvering room."

"I didn't like the crotch stuff, either," said Chris, returning to Fay.

"Too heavy?"

"Too shy."

Fay laughed. "I guess I don't have much experience with men's crotches."

"The three of us, private workout, later," said Chris, moving aside to get a better view of the stage. "And, townspeople, all the blocking is wrong for the start of the number. Watch your marks. Alice, aren't you supposed to be to the right of the... Yes. Robert, you're totally off. You should be... Yes, but more... Okay, don't move. Donald, didn't I set you up stage right of Alice? Well, get there, please. I love the way the Caucasians bunch up together, because I positively remember a
highly integrated blocking.
Who's directing, me or the White Aryans?"

Blue was in the house, sitting in the third row, vacantly taking it in. At the break, he talked with Walt for a bit, each of them occasionally eyeing the Kid as they spoke. They're going to ask if Walt can move into my house, the Kid thought, watching them. Blue's trying to gauge my mood. They've probably been planning this for days, the little sneaks.

So Blue and Walt came over, and, indeed, asked if Walt could move into Blue's room.

"Hmm, arresting proposition," said the Kid, treading water. "I mean, maybe, but what if?"

"Those cousins of his are given' him a hard time," said Blue. "They don't like me much."

"This has happened awfully fast, hasn't it?"

"When it's right, you know it's right," said Walt.

"Look, short stuff," the Kid told him, "when it's right,
I'll tell you it's right."

"My friend Shreve says it's the correct politics for gay men to live together and build lives. And my friend Carson says that makes them holy. And my friend Spider says a nation of gay lovers will shock the world."

"Your friend
Spider
?" said the Kid.

"Blue and I are buddies now."

I don't want this enchanting boy in the house, the Kid was thinking. But what objection could he, fairly, offer?

"You could see it like this," said Blue. "You've got money, and folks've heard a you, and you know everybody in town. You
have
what you want from life. So what would interfere with this boy comin' into yer house?"

"What are you saying, that I have no future?"

"I'm sayin' that you could be generous."

"All right," the Kid told Blue, as Walt took his lover's hand in excitement. "Make sure he knows the rules about saving water."

Blue pulled Walt's hand up and kissed it. You fine young fellows; how you tease. This is what love looks like—I see it now. Blue fucks me, I say, Nice, stud. Blue fucks Walt, and it's You are my dream of life, forever that I live.

But that is so
ridiculous.
To think that the emergence of one person in your life will change anything. Nobody changes anybody's life. We
are
what we
are.

After the rehearsal, Alice and Fay walked out of the theatre together and, quite naturally—that is, with no one's saying, Are we doing this?, but the two doing this all the same—walked west down Sacramento.

"It's changey, being black and lesbian in such a mixed cast," said Fay.

"Chris Lundquist is famous for interracial casting," said Alice.

"It's not like real television, though, is it? Chris says soap opera is the fundamental American art form—I say it's video games."

Alice always speaks quietly. "They're from Japan."

"Yeah.... Oh, is that what you are? Japanese?"

"Chinese."

"Sorry."

"Never fear," said Alice. "It's a dread war between the two races, but nobody else is supposed to know or care about it."

They walked in silence for a while.

"How about a coffee stop?" Fay asked, at length. "We can do that actory thing and complain about the director."

"I adore her."

"Or the other actors."

"Oh yes, let's."