Fellow Travelers (33 page)

The last man whose breath he’d smelled was Joseph McCarthy. Now, as his surviving heart pounded louder and louder, mimicking the volume of the footsteps coming up the stairs, he wanted only to feel and taste the air coming from Hawkins Fuller’s mouth.

And there he was at last, in the room, Hawk, the silhouette of his figure visible in the dark.

Fuller lit a match and held it under his face, which blazed up like one of the La Tour paintings Tim had seen in Paris. He walked forward. “Take your scarf.”

Tim rose from the blanket and slid the muffler, knitted by his mother, from Hawkins’ neck, while with the hand not holding the match, Fuller reached into his pocket for a candle. Lighting it, he looked for a place to prop it up and, unable to find one, he let it drip a wax base onto one of the turret’s windowsills.

Tim’s spirit leapt with a deduction:
He hasn’t been up here with anyone else; he would already have figured out the problem with the candle if he had. He made this place for us.

Fuller reached into the other pocket of his suit, which in the candle’s new light, Tim could see, bulged with a paper bag. From it Fuller extracted a pint bottle of milk. He pulled off its small cap and tossed the little circle of cardboard onto the blanket, like a poker chip.

“Drink.”

Tim took two swallows and then Hawkins tilted the bottle further back, until more milk was coming out than Tim could swallow. It ran down his cheek and chin, and Hawk began to lick it off, and twice, once gently and once not, to bite him. He took off Tim’s shirt and then he removed his own.

In the rush to speed both of them toward nakedness, Tim spilled the rest of the small bottle onto the bare, warped floor near the blanket.

“Don’t cry over—you know,” said Hawk.

But he was crying anyway. “I love you, Hawk.” He pressed himself against Fuller’s body, which was still tanned from the trip to Bermuda with his wife.

Holding Tim’s shoulders from behind, bringing his lips to the boy’s ear, Fuller felt how much he had missed him—the smoothness, the frailty, the chatter and the tender heart. And so, to reclaim the protective thrill that would come with ravishment, he felt himself starting to say the words he knew he shouldn’t, words that were actually a bit more true than he would have expected them to be, but sufficiently porous and no doubt strategic that, if he believed in Skippy’s loving god, or even in his own austere one, he would be asking for forgiveness as soon as he said them.

But he said them anyway: “I love you, too.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

March 11–25, 1957

“How do you stand it? This is
awful
,” said Mary, sipping the glass of milk. “But Dr. Sullivan insists it’s a good idea.”

Tim smiled at her from the same chair he’d occupied when she first had him to dinner here three years ago.

“So,” she said, pointing to the pregnancy that was now quite visible, even under her navy-blue maternity blouse. “
You
were embarrassed to come see
me
?”

He laughed. As soon as he arrived, he had confessed—in the high-pitched tones of wild happiness—the resumption of his romance with Fuller.

“I hesitated to call you when I first got back,” he now explained, “because I knew that if I came here we’d talk about him.”

“And you didn’t want to tempt yourself with even the sound of his name.”

“Something like that. And then, once things
did
happen, I felt I shouldn’t come around because of, you know, her.” It was the one part that shamed and frightened him. As if things hadn’t been bad enough before, Hawkins Fuller now had a wife.

“I actually read up on it,” he continued. “I wasn’t sure whether
I
was committing adultery by being with someone married. It turns out that I am, whereas I’d hoped my guilt in that department might be limited to leading Fuller astray.”

They both laughed.

“Thanks again for these,” said Mary, pointing to the handkerchiefs brocaded with shamrocks that Tim had bought at Garfinckel’s. “They’re pretty.”

In fact he’d gone shopping for a St. Patrick’s Day present for Hawk, but realized that there was now a problem of detection—what if Lucy found it?

“Still,” he said. “It’s awful. I’ve had to shut her out of my mind. And despite everything I’m still taking Communion. Just making up my own rules! It’s all different from the last time. With him, I mean.”

What he wanted to tell her and couldn’t was the
reason
the whole cosmos and catechism had rewritten themselves. Everything was different because Hawk had said “I love you, too,” a showering of grace more powerful than any papal dispensation. He couldn’t tell Mary because he believed that unless he guarded this secret, Hawk’s words and their meaning might evaporate. It didn’t matter that Hawk had said them only once. He had
said
them—and unlike, it seemed, the catechism, they would remain in effect forever.

“What I can’t understand,” he did say, “is why you don’t disapprove. I know you always liked me, but you never liked the idea of
it
, and now it’s worse because of her.” He couldn’t bring himself to say Lucy’s name.

“Maybe my own experience has
broadened
me,” she said, patting her stomach. “In more ways than one.”

And yet, some part of her was absurdly distressed to think that
she
—if Tim’s reading was correct—had committed adultery, too. She had described to him the pregnancy and her plans: to leave next month for the pious lady’s establishment in the Garden District, as if she were awaiting a virgin birth.

For all his own revelations, Tim had been too much a gentleman to ask who the father was.

“You think it’s Paul’s,” she said, all at once unable to have him go on believing “the brewer” had been guilty of some sentimental slip-up a year after marrying Marjorie. “It’s not.”

She proceeded to tell the whole story of Fred Bell, who just the other day had testified as one of several “free world volunteers” before Representative Kelly’s committee investigating the government’s hobbled response to Hungary. “He got the Estonia spot on the witness list,” she explained.

“That would be a pretty name for a girl,” Tim suggested.

“Estonia?”

They considered it for a moment and started to laugh. Tim came over to sit on her side of the table. With his arm around her, he found Mary to be unfamiliarly plump. Still, in most respects she was herself. He knew there would be no crying; the shamrock handkerchiefs remained dry and unreached for. He drew her head to his shoulder.

“Does he know?” asked Tim. “The father, I mean.”

“No, though he will if I stay in Washington much longer.”

“Does Fuller know?”

“Same answer. The fiction I supplied to the department was ‘complications from appendicitis,’ necessitating a brief hospitalization, immediate resignation, and a long convalescence out of town. I’ve been lying low. And just lying. I had somebody tell the bureau that the real attack and surgery happened in New Orleans a few days after I left the office feeling poorly. I imagine Fuller suspects more strongly than Fred does. A couple of times the phone has rung and I’ve felt strangely sure that’s who it was: Fuller. It’s hard to be certain, but Beverly knows, which means Jerry knows, and Jerry has a big mouth, I’m afraid.”

Tim thought of how, in his own position here tonight, Jerry or one of the “femme” friends Hawk sometimes spoke of would be making jokes about having become, just like Mary, the Other Woman. But it wasn’t the sort of joke he could crack himself. He apologized instead: “I’m sorry I came over here so jazzed up and joyful, and then went on talking and talking about myself—even after I could see!” He placed a hand on the pleated rayon covering her belly.

“It’s all right,” she said, taking her head off his shoulder and putting his on hers. “You’re
happy,
baby.” She sounded very Southern, as if she were already halfway home. “Try to stay that way.”

Two weeks later, as Fuller lit a cigarette, Tim said: “You haven’t noticed. I’ve given those up for Lent.”

“If you really loved God, you’d give up milk.”

Or you, Tim thought.

“The American Communist Party has given up violence and spying,” he replied instead.

“For forty days?”

“Forever, they say. There are ‘various roads to socialism,’ and democracy now seems to be one of them. Maybe all this will be encouraging to Woodforde.”

Fuller thought of the conversations the two of them had had about the
Nation
writer, whose new inner conflict was so different from Skippy’s enduring fervor. Timothy’s blazing political belief matched, of course, the religious zeal, but to Fuller’s mind neither had ever seemed to go with the simple freckled rest of him. He was like that Iowa schoolgirl Preminger had just picked to play Joan of Arc: no matter how hard she tried, once they released the picture you’d still be seeing a cornstalk instead of a burning stake.

“Hawk, one or two of the Hungarians I’ve met are hearing rumors the government’s going to shut down the refugee program—that the U.S. is going to return to normal quotas or let in only the applicants whose relatives are already here. A couple of people waiting to get out of the camps in Austria may have committed
suicide.
I mean, we won’t do this, will we? We’d be betraying them
twice.
”

“Your elected officials just haven’t gotten around to passing the bill that will keep the spigot open. I get to make phone calls on its behalf every day.”

“Okay,” said Tim, not fully reassured. “I had another note from Mr. Osborne, very nice. They have to do all these checks and so forth. That’s what’s slowing things down. You guys are worse than the army! Speaking of which: Major Conroy sent Mr. Osborne a ‘superb recommendation.’ So at least says Mr. Osborne. If it’s true, it was awfully nice of Conroy: I’m pretty sure he thought I was a pain in the neck, especially at the end. Anyway, I just wish they’d speed things up and hire me.”

He leaned in and kissed Fuller’s bare chest. They had climaxed once already, but as they lay on the blankets together Tim was once more hard against Hawk’s stomach, experiencing, he thought, a kind of unified happiness: God and politics and love were for once aligned in peaceful coexistence.

The other day he’d bought a portable radio and brought it here. Set to
Twilight Tunes
on WRC, it was now playing “These Foolish Things.” Hawk, who had greeted the radio’s arrival with a questioning look, casually reached over and moved the dial until he landed on
Bob and Ray.
Wally Ballou was running for mayor, and after a moment or two Tim was enjoying the comic routine even more than the romantic music. “They used to do ‘Mr. Trace, Keener Than Most Persons,’” he explained to Fuller.

But at the first commercial he clicked off the little box, the better to concentrate on kissing Hawk, who soon flipped him over and entered him. Their rhythms and avidity matched; familiarity—their own history—now allowed them to merge with a completeness they hadn’t been able to manage, even during the good moments, three years before. Hawk pulled on his hair a precise moment before they both came.

The days had grown a bit longer, but even so, by the time the two of them were finished the streetlamps had come on. Realizing it was time to go find his Plymouth and drive home to Alexandria for dinner, Fuller retrieved his car keys from under one of the blankets.

“Are you eating much these days?” he asked, brushing his hand over Tim’s rib cage.

“I’ll buy myself a sandwich on the way home,” Tim explained through a dreamy yawn. “On nights when Woodforde’s girlfriend tries to cook, everybody flees. You know, Mr. Osborne says the job
will
be in the main State Department building, so if it comes through I thought I’d try to get a little place not far from where you used to be on I Street. I can cook for myself then.”

Fuller found himself suddenly wary. Inside Skippy a future little life was rising, as surely as the white-brick apartment house beginning to grow from the ruins of the gasworks across the street.

“Where exactly are my jockey shorts, Timothy?”

“I was hoping to steal them.” He laughed. “Try under the plaid blanket, near the radio.”

Fuller dressed in the gathering darkness, but with only a sandwich awaiting him, Tim lingered in the makeshift bed. Fuller glimpsed his face in the orange glow of the space heater; it looked like some small ornament lit by a Christmas bulb. Its cheer and serenity prompted him to remember the expression’s opposite, a face Tim had shown during an especially tormented moment back in the early days, while he’d been explaining yet another spiritual infraction he was afraid of committing.

“Tell me, Skippy. Why give up
anything
for Lent when you’re not even taking Communion?”

“I
am
taking Communion.” Tim’s eyes remained closed and he was smiling. He seemed to be falling asleep, pleasantly exhausted.

It was becoming clear to Fuller that Skippy now believed everything between them to have been somehow miraculously sanctified; he seemed to have reached the conclusion that he, too, could live as a bigamist. Just as Hawkins Fuller could go home to Lucy, Timothy Laughlin could go home to God—until it was again time to meet here, which the two of them would keep doing until the house was torn down, at which point they would presumably start going to the “place not far from where you used to be on I Street.”

From the moment he had allowed things to resume, Fuller had feared that Tim would end up making trouble, would become a hysterical version of Tony Bianco, threatening a scene—not for money but assurance, for some further allotment of affection. One morning he would show up on the Fullers’ suburban doorstep, wracked with anger and some fresh twist of biblical shame.

But here he was: happy, calm, wanting not so much as a second “I love you.” He had taken, it seemed, some vow of emotional poverty that he was willing to keep six days a week, if only on the seventh, or close enough, he could be released from it here. He would grow old in this city, become like all the other skinny, obedient clerks and bookshelvers keeping their heads down at the Library of Congress, the ones who’d come to town years before to escape the fists and cruelties of their fathers and the village hearties. He’d learn to cook, to go to Sunday-afternoon concerts at the Coolidge Auditorium with his chums. He’d save his money to go see the occasional musical in tryouts on its way to New York. He’d lose the political zealotry, once he finally realized politics to be no more than the widgets turned out by this particular company town. The religious quaverings would subside, too, displaced into solemn, furtive acknowledgment of “Mr. Fuller” when they passed in the corridor, and into more flamboyant weekly worship of the same in the little place off I Street, where a picture of the beloved would be kept out in a frame near the record player, except when Fuller himself or anyone other than Skippy’s fellow nelly clerks came to visit.

Timothy Laughlin would not be the big trouble that Hawkins Fuller feared, the trouble against which Lucy’s money would shield him. No, Skippy would be a grim safe harbor, one that would trap him in a domesticity even danker than the one across the river in Alexandria. The thrill of protectiveness and ravishment would be long gone, replaced with a cup of coffee and a slice of cake and an ongoing obligation to fuck the good little aging boy who had “given up everything”—the nelly clerks would start to tell him—for Hawkins Fuller.

Dressed now, Fuller lay back down on the blankets and took Tim in his arms. The two of them wriggled around until they were spooning, with Tim holding Hawk from behind, momentarily falling asleep against his back, while Fuller faced the turret’s circular wall. Unheard by Tim, he whispered: “I’m sorry.”

And he was, he thought; maybe even more than he knew.

As he started down H Street toward the office and his Plymouth, Fuller passed the worst of the neighborhood’s gingerbread shanties and wondered just how impressed the Negroes of Foggy Bottom were by the knowledge that one of their own, the State Department’s Dr. Ralph Bunche, had been dispatched to sort things out in the Middle East. Fuller imagined that the feds would eventually name a park for Bunche somewhere along here, probably once the last of the Negroes had been priced out of the area.

He entered State on Twenty-first Street and found a couple of people still in the bureau. He half hoped that Mr. Hill might be there to see him returning to his desk at such a late hour. Inside his office he hung up his tweed overcoat and then his suit jacket, both of them smelling faintly of the brewer’s condemned love nest.