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Authors: Ethan Mordden

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BOOK: Everybody Loves You
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I suppose Dennis Savage was right to question Tom's suitability as a guest in our house, with his uh-huh and dead looks. But it was an odd house to begin with, known as Chinatown for no reason that anyone could name, and, this summer, veritably full of unsuitables—Lionel, for instance, one of my best friends but entirely too intelligent for anyone's good. Some people get 800 on their physics boards; Lionel got the Nobel Peace Prize. It was Lionel's resolute caprice to be attracted only to the dimmest, most impenetrable men. “I'm in love with that number,” he would murmur in a bar. “He looks so
stoopid.
” Lionel's number of the hour was Bert, so stoopid he spoke like a Valley Girl. When you first met him, you assumed he was doing a Valley Girl imitation. No, he simply spoke like a Valley Girl. I found it amusing, though it drove Dennis Savage crazy.

It was 1979. I had just turned thirty and was only now seriously considering the prospect of Growing Older, with all the loss and vitiation that it promises; today, of course, I look back on this time as my salad days. Dennis Savage's lover, Little Kiwi, had joined us but recently (alas, with his incalculably batty dog, Bauhaus), our supreme hunk-in-residence, Carlo, was still fancy-free and keen with dish on the giddy ways of the Circuit, and we all knew we hadn't yet learned everything there is to learn. We were young. We were healthy. We were having a grand time. The only person I knew of in our generation who had died was Jeff Willis, of my class at Friends Academy, killed in a car accident in his freshman year at Duke.

It is a quirk of the Island that while all houses in Cherry Grove run on the same rhythm—i.e., retirement torpor—each Pines house sets a unique pace. Some are as Arranged as Neapolitan marriages, others rather libertarian, some crowded with berserk guests, others strictly limited to the shareholders. Ours, set up by Dennis Savage, was classic Pines, slow to start in the morning, thinly lively by lunch, building to a heavily socialized dinner. However, there we diverged from the norm, which called for naps, drugging up, and the walk along the beach to dance at the Ice Palace. Lionel, Bert, and Carlo danced, but without artificial stimulation; and the rest of us usually hung around for games and assorted nonsense. Dennis Savage and I were playing out a craze for the old word game Jotto, and Little Kiwi was obsessed with mastering the Polaroid camera Dennis Savage had bought him, and with the construction of plastic models of dinosaurs, a group of which he had set up on the little table out on the deck, dubbed The Wonderful Museum of Terror Lizards. Never one to waste a passion, Little Kiwi would inveigle drop-ins and bystanders into posing with his models so he could photograph them.

Tom Adverse fit into our routine with his typical lifeless aplomb. “I could buff this,” he would observe, running his hand pensively, caressingly, over the faded paint on the deck railing, or—looking over the kitchen end of the living room—“You ought to let me put in one of those spigots that come out with instant boiling water.”

Cooking was another of his fields. Apparently he fended off gay hunger by busying himself with kitchen matters—it gave him a chance to turn his back, politely, on the roiling, wishful needs of men he could like but never love. Thus, hearing Dennis Savage, Lionel, and me arguing over whose turn it was to prepare dinner, Tom said, “Well, you know I could fix some four-happiness rice pastry for dessert.”

Whereupon Little Kiwi snapped his picture.

“Do you like four-happiness rice pastry?” he asked Little Kiwi.

“Mostly I just know Rice Krinkles.”

“Uh-huh,” said Tom, not as much replying as punctuating the exchange.

Vietnam was another of Tom's topics, though the subject seldom came up in the house. Not that that mattered, since Tom never heard what anyone was saying in the first place. His every utterance was an outburst, a non sequitur, a frame without the picture. You would come upon him hammering away at something on the deck. You would offer a pleasantry or two about nothing in particular. And he would look up from his work and say, “On a scale of one to ten, I give
Apocalypse Now
a four.”

Little Kiwi enjoyed Tom's line of speech for its sheer surprise. But after a while even he began eyeing Tom askance, because no matter how much you put in, nothing ever came out. I truly believe Tom was starved for friendship, grateful for any attention (as long as it didn't bear a sexual price tag), literally
relieved
to be asked among us. Yet he seemed unable to respond to people, almost preschizoid in his absentee companionship. So Tom fit in as he always did: by not fitting in. It's hard to complain about a man that terrific looking (though Dennis Savage found a way), and he did make himself useful around the house, tinkering and repairing. Besides, trying to cheer Tom up, to make him feel
connected,
was my good deed for the week.

Everyone helped, except Tom. The more welcoming you behaved, the weirder he got. Coming downstairs in the bright midmorning after his first night with us, he went right to the kitchen to make breakfast for the house.

“Carlo will love this,” I said, noting the full complement of eggs, bacon, toast, three kinds of jam, and coffee that Tom was whipping up. He was even heating the milk. “One thing Carlo believes in is the full dinner pail.”

“Uh-huh,” says Tom. “I saw a ghost last night.”

“A … ghost?”

“That's right.”

And he goes right on with his work.

“A real ghost?” I pursued.

“I don't know how one of those things would be real or not,” he replied, setting up the plates. “But it was a ghost.”

He ladled out the food and brought two heaping plates outside. I took the milk and coffee.

“How do you say ‘Come and get it' around here?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “Everyone just shows up, sooner or later.”

He nodded. Hot food, cold food; nothing matters.

“So,” I said, working on the imported roughcut Scotch lemon marmalade, a house gift from earlier in the season, so New York and hip and A-list, so sovereign of style and playful of taste. Tom, across the table, munched his toast naked. The toast was naked, too. “So, Tom, what about this ghost?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, was it … wearing a sheet?”

“What're these funny animals for?”

“That's Little Kiwi's Wonderful Museum of—”

“I could paint these deck things for you. Put some orange and navy blue on these chairs, so you'll stand out from the other places here. Hot boys looking up from the water during the beach parade after lunch, they'll want to be a part of this.”

Note that Tom knew and was totally comfortable with the ways of the Circuit—the only straight I've known who was. All of the few nonhomophobic straights of my acquaintance would just as soon not hear about The Life in too much detail. Some faces go white at the very mention of the word “popper.” You could describe the ins and outs of a Colt orgy to Tom, down to the last balling in and creaming out, and all he'd say is “Yeah.”

Dennis Savage found that odd. “Doesn't this guy ever date?” he asked. “I can buy that he's happy around gay men, for whatever virtually unbelievable reason. But if he's really straight, shouldn't there be a woman in the picture somewhere?”

“There have been several. But there's always trouble, somehow. They break up pretty fast.”

We had been cleaning out the pantry. He took me by the arm, led me to the couch, sat me down, and joined me.

“Tell,” he said.

“No, because you're just looking for holes to poke into his story.”

“Nay, I merely love to hear you make icons of various deadbeats and zanies just because you like their looks. First there's Carlo, your typical do-nothing Circuit joyrider, building a life entirely around the next meal, the next lay, and the next unemployment check. There are hundreds like him around here. I could buy a party of them for pin money. But no, after you get through recreating him, Carlo is our King Arthur, our Gandalf, our Little Boy Blue, isn't he? Our oracle! Our
guru!
And then we have …
Tom!

Who was standing at the doorway to the deck, now sporting the famous cutoff jeans, his face its usual blank. “I was going to fix lunch,” he said. “Some chickens in the fridge. Could you stand to take them barbecue, or were you saving them for some other deal?”

“No, chicken is fine.”

“Build a fire,” he said, backing up, “out here on the—”

“Just don't step on my diplodocus,” came Little Kiwi's voice, along with the click of the Polaroid. “Bauhaus, let's make some more candids.”

Bauhaus barked.

“Oooh rillly,” said Lionel's boyfriend Bert, coming up from the beach with Lionel. “Prehistoric
Cit-ty!

“Lionel, could you please stand there a second so I can take your picture? No, closer to the brontosaurus.”

“Like
tot-tal
behemoth,” Bert observed, coming inside.

“Bert almost killed a palaeosaur,” Lionel announced.

“Nöe, I did-dn't,” as they swept through the house.

Carlo came down and sat on the couch with us.

“Everything's happening at once,” he said, grinning. “This place is full of loving, dancing gentlemen trying to figure what they're supposed to be doing with their own history.”

“The first ten years of Stonewall,” I crowed to Dennis Savage, “in a sentence!”

“I'll get you later,” he said, rising.

“Crazy house,” said Carlo.

“Look out for my iguanodon,” Little Kiwi cried from outside.

“Saw something odd here last night,” said Carlo. “Upstairs there. Wonder if you saw it ever.”

“If I had to cite all the odd things I've seen in Pines houses over the years … You know, this is one of the Island's historic sites. It's had everything from visiting movie stars to a suicide.”

“Yeah, well, now it's got a ghost, too. You know what I mean?”

“Uh-oh.”

“Or what should I call it? Something creepy coming around at night. Unless the kid himself there is doing tricks with his camera.”

“What exactly did you see?”

He thought about it. “Kind of hard to say it exactly. It's more of a feeling that something's there than a sight to see. There's some light to it, sort of, like a million tiny candles moving together. And you hear something, like very slow words. Like different people taking turns on a sentence. Couldn't quite make it out.”

“You weren't afraid?”

“Happens too fast to be afraid. Got up to take a whizz and this thing comes down the hall, right past me. I just wondered if anyone else has checked in with you on this matter ever.”

“Oddly enough … uh, this couldn't by any chance be some elaborate joke, could it? I mean, I love the million tiny candles and the sound effects are intriguing, but you realize of course that there are no such things as ghosts.”

Carlo smiled. “I always think so. But I did see something last night in this house like I'm telling you about.”

“Tom said something about a ghost, too. I just thought maybe you and he…” Carlo and I looked out through the sliding doors giving onto the deck, where Little Kiwi was holding forth on the size of the teeth in the stegosaurus, demonstrating on his model as Tom blankly stared, socially detained but emotionally touring, off on a tear among his private demons. “No,” I said, “that's impossible. Tom is incapable of making anything up. What he is is what you get.”

Carlo shook his head. “He's hiding plenty of stuff. Rough stuff inside there. He only shows you the smooth.”

“Oh, certainly. I just mean that he can't create anything. There's no art in Tom Adverse.”

“Forty years old,” Carlo mused, “and he's still got a twenty-eight-inch waist. How does a guy that fine-looking get so wrecked inside?”

Tom suddenly wandered in—he's vague but he's abrupt—to ask where the charcoal was. Carlo had an appointment in another house, Lionel and Bert went back to the beach, Little Kiwi came inside to try “some shadow poses,” and so the house reshuffled its hands, set up for the next play as surely as the stage of a repertory theatre. I could say that I was so busy with one thing and another (not to mention the Jotto championship, which Dennis Savage and I played as if for our lives) that I didn't bother with the ghost reports. I could say that. But then, how does one cope with ghost reports in the first place? What agency does one alert? What steps can one take on one's own?

Besides, there are no ghosts. There are only scientific explanations for alleged sightings. I reckoned the explanation would come along in due course, so I thought no more of the matter till late that night.

I had been putting together a party tape out of an antique miscellany—the overture to
The Boy Friend,
dated ballads by Bing Crosby, Julie Andrews, Diahann Carroll, and Danny Meehan, the Warner Brothers symphonies of Erich Korngold, a bit of
My Fair Lady
in Swedish, and so on, the whole tracked over with dialogue from old movies. I made such tapes for a living when I first came to New York, and though I had long retired from the field, I occasionally revved something up for an old friend, for the fun of it. When I began, this night, I was surrounded by company, because a thunderstorm had struck and dancing was out. Lionel was playing cribbage with Dennis Savage and (for narrative honesty demands a fair report) was wiping up the floor with him. Bert was getting his culture in, catching up on some old
Target
magazines someone had left behind. Little Kiwi was constructing a triceratops. Carlo was assisting Little Kiwi. Tom was sitting quietly in his usual daze.

Even a sixty-minute tape can take hours to complete, what with the split-second expertise needed to splice a conniption from Joan Crawford in her
Mildred Pierce
period into, if possible, Judy Garland's “Over the Rainbow,” or to jump from Ella Fitzgerald's “No Strings” into Fred Astaire's in mid-chorus without cheating the beat. So, long before I was finished, the company had begun to scatter to their beds, and by the time I hit the finale—Bobby Short's “I'll See You Again”—only Carlo was left, idly rummaging through the
Target
books to see if he could find someone he hadn't had.

BOOK: Everybody Loves You
5.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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