Flesh and Blood (19 page)

“Oh, but very white skin can be lovely. What kind of lipstick do you use, do you tend toward frosted pinks?”

“You know, if I get too frosty and pink I can look like somebody who just washed up on the beach after a couple of weeks. I know this may shock you, but I've started dabbling in red. I mean
red
red. Scarlet.”

“Really?” Mary said.

“You couldn't wear it just anywhere. But you know, here in New York I sometimes find it's best to shock them before they can shock you.”

“I suppose. Hey, I shouldn't be taking up your time like this.”

“Not at all. I've enjoyed this little talk immensely.”

“Me too. I'm sure I'll be speaking to you again.”

“I hope so. I'll tell Zoe you called. Bye bye.”

“Bye.”

Mary hung up the phone and lay down on the bed again. As she expected, the silence and uncertainty were waiting for her. But she felt, in some small measure, comforted. There was someone in the world she could talk to about simple unimportant things, a charming woman who spoke without grandeur or condescension. Mary looked up at the snowy plaster of the ceiling, listened to the jostle of traffic. The next time she talked to Zoe she'd chide her, gently, for keeping this lovely new friend of hers a secret.

1979/
The songs said love was everywhere. Under Will's window a man in a hunter's cap and crusty plaid pants spent half the night crying out, “Hey, do you love me, do you love me, hey, motherfucker, I'm talking to you.” You could call the police but he just came back again—this was his territory. Will played records to drown him out, rock singers and jazz trombonists who were all asking, with music, the same insistent question.
Do you love me, do you love me, hey, fucker, do you love me?
Will couldn't seem to fall in love with anything so complex and elusive as another person. He didn't worry. He didn't worry much. He shared a big cold apartment with a woman friend and her five-year-old daughter. He had a tight little orbit of friends. Romance happened elsewhere, to other people. It could come to him in its own time. He was twenty-six, and didn't dislike himself too much. Only a little, only at moments. Sometimes, when no one could hear, after a day of classes he sat at his desk and let himself emit a series of sharp little moans over all the meetings, the shifty victories with students, the potential for humiliation that seemed to grow endlessly from the seam connecting his job as the students' master to his more complex, and perhaps truer, role as their servant. Will thought sometimes of the night years ago when he'd looked into his father's angry face, his steady feeding, and said, 'I'm going to be a teacher.' He'd said it merely for effect, to confound his father's expectations. But afterward he'd kept thinking of his father's outraged response: 'You got to go to Harvard to teach pickaninnies?' The speck of sauce on his father's chin, the soft dead blue of the dining-room wallpaper. As Will had traveled around the country, picking up jobs as a waiter or an errand boy—as he'd prepared himself to leave his childhood and begin a life of work—he'd found his old ideas about architecture slipping away and he'd begun to know, gradually, with a kind of heady, satisfying helplessness, that a teacher was what he would in fact become.

So he taught fifth grade on Beacon Hill, for sixteen thousand dollars a year. He had his friends, his carefully inexpensive dinners out, his French or Italian movies. He walked, read, bought clothes in discount stores. He looked for love.

He met the man on an ordinary night. He met him in a downtown bar where old men offered drinks and porcelain smiles, the muscular hunger of fathers, to young cowboys just off the bus. Will went there for the strangeness of it. He wasn't expecting anything. He'd drink a beer or two, talk to the old guys. He liked them; he thought of them as ghostly heroes gone to the shadow realm. They came from another era. They'd spent their best years crouched in public toilets, bravely searching the silences of city parks. Now they were like refugees arrived in a land of plenty. If their smiles were ravenous, if they bird-dogged some kid just in from Worcester or Fall River, Will could forgive them. They were his uncles, they'd been misused. They had stories you wouldn't believe.

The man stood near the door, drinking a beer. He stood in the jukebox light as if it were an ordinary thing to be so large and fair and handsome, to have a firm heavy jaw and shoulders broad as the wings of a plow. He was too much for this place. Even the uncles were afraid of him. The uncles could manage a nervous boy from a dying textile town. They could speak with wry insistence into the face of some skinny kid's jerry-rigged self-assurance, because they knew what was in his heart. They knew fear better than anybody. They'd lived fear, they'd survived it. They'd married without love, they'd been beaten by criminals and by the police, spit their own teeth out on the pavement. Now they sat boldly on bar-stools, neat and perfumed, prosperous, talking in gentle voices to the more privileged manifestations of themselves from twenty or thirty years ago. They had the serene disregard of child emperors grown old. But this man was too perfect. No one went near him.

Will leaned on the bar, talking to a man named Rockwell. Rockwell was a ringer for Everett Dirksen. He wore a hothouse tulip in his lapel. “Must be some mistake,” he said, sipping at his daiquiri and nodding toward the man. “His feathers must've caught fire and he plopped down on Washington Street. It happens sometimes, you know. They fly too close to the sun.”

Will said, “I don't think he's real. I think he's a hallucination we're all having. It's mass hysteria, you get enough gay men together in one place and sometimes their dreams sort of, like, coalesce.”

“Oh, he's no dream, Willy. He's real, he's on the prowl. Trust me, he's out tonight looking for something.”

“Love,” Will said. “Love love love love love. What's anybody looking for?”

“Lots of things,” Rockwell said. He sang,
“Most gentlemen don't like love, they just like to kick it around.
Cole Porter, the sage of our century.”

“I don't know,” Will said. “We're afraid of love, don't you think? We say we want what we can get. If we can get laid, we say that's all we want. But really, don't you think everybody just wants to fall in love?”

“A very pretty view of human nature. Frankly, I half wish he'd go away. He's making me nervous. What does he
want
here? Just veneration, if you ask me. There are men like that. Admiration queens. I'll bet you the price of a drink he's going to go to a half-dozen bars tonight, speak to no one, and then go home and get off in front of a mirror.”

“Who knows?” Will said. “Do you think it's fair to judge somebody like that just because he's handsome?”

“Old crones have been passing harsh judgments on pretty young things since time immemorial. Those of us who were once pretty young things ourselves are usually correct.”

“He could just be here hoping to meet somebody. Why not?”

Rockwell said, “The Duchess of Windsor could be browsing Woolworth's hoping to find something she'd like, but the odds are she'd have an ulterior motive. How old are you, Willy? Aren't you about ready to shed your youthful idealism? Past a certain age, it's no longer becoming.”

“What will you give me if I go talk to him?”

“My undying respect.”

“If he turns out to be just a regular, decent guy, you'll have to buy me my drinks for the rest of the month. How's that?”

“All right. Go. Report back.”

Will took his beer and walked purposefully up to the man. It was the only way. He got courage from Rockwell, from the idea of being seen as someone heedless and courageous. He said, “Excuse me, but I have to ask. What are you doing here?”

“Huh?” The man's face was blunt, placid, deeply carved. He was Will's age, a little older.

“This bar is the exclusive province of sad old queens,” Will said. “I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave.”

“You're not an old queen,” the man said. He tilted his beer bottle to his lips. An oval of reflected light slipped along the bottle's shaft.

“I have visiting rights here,” Will said. “My name is Will.”

“Matt,” the man said. They shook hands. Matt wore a white dress shirt and pale blue corduroys, smelled too strongly of cologne. His hair, a lavish abundance of dark-blond curls, did not quite touch his collar.

“You really are getting everybody all upset,” Will said softly, conspiratorially. “You're too handsome for this place. You're making everybody else feel like they look the way they really do look.”

“Maybe I should leave,” Matt said.

A shock of uncertainty ran through Will. Was he driving the man off? He knew that when he was nervous he could be too slick, too clever, though he knew, too, that in a sense he did want this Matt to go. He was too finely wrought, too fortunate. The ease of his beauty hung awkwardly in the unfresh air.

“No,” Will said. “I didn't really mean it, I'm just trying, you know, to be clever.”

“I'm getting tired, anyway,” Matt said. “I have to get up in the morning.”

“Oh. Well.”

Matt yawned to illustrate his fatigue. A thread of clear saliva stretched from his upper to his lower teeth.

“I actually have to get up, too,” Will said. “I have to teach in the morning. I just came out for a quick beer with my aunts and uncles.”

“You're a teacher?” Matt asked.

“Yeah.”

“I just finished school.”

“Really?”

“I just got my master's in government. From Harvard.”

“Well. Somebody's got to do it.”

“Uh-huh,” Matt said. “Hey, I've got to go.”

“Okay.”

There was a shuffling, a nameless transition. Will and Matt looked at each other, shrugged as if they shared a joke. Matt asked, “Do you feel like coming over to my place for one more beer?”

Will blinked. Matt must, in fact, be a hallucination. It did not seem possible that a man like this, a man heavy-jawed and muscular as all his dreams, would invite him home. He didn't live in that kind of world.

“Okay,” Will said. “Sure.”

“So. Let's go.”

They got their coats. As he left the bar with Matt, Will glanced back at Rockwell. Rockwell lifted his daiquiri glass, and Will imagined him at a harbor, standing among the parents and the abandoned sweethearts, watching a ship depart. Rockwell had been handsome once, he'd lived in the network of possibilities, and Will felt, briefly, the plain loneliness that waited for everyone. The little bag of groceries, the long walk up the stairs. Then he stepped out of the bar behind Matt.

Outside, the air sparkled with a fine mist of ice. Matt hailed a cab, and their conversation ended. He gave the driver an address in Cambridge, six blocks or so from the house Will had lived in when he himself was at Harvard, settled into the back seat next to Will, and disappeared inside himself. Will asked a couple of questions, simple ones about school and place of origin, but Matt answered with single syllables and watched the city pass outside the window. To calm his nerves, Will checked Matt for human signs. His fingernails were not well trimmed. His cologne (Will knew the brand) was cheap and ordinary. He would have hopes and an inner grove of disappointments, even with his beauty and girth. He would once have been a child, crying with frustration.

Matt lived in a brown brick high-rise, one of the buildings Will used to pass and wonder, with a shiver, who would choose to live there. The silence held as Matt led Will into the lobby and into the elevator. Matt's beauty was untainted by the harsh elevator light but his face, in its rocky quietude, did not look so open or so calmly benevolent as it had in the bar and the taxi. Suddenly, Will could not imagine kissing him. He began to tell himself, This will pass. Whatever happens, I'll be back on the street soon, back
in
my life. He thought about what he would eat when he got home. There were bananas, a little overripe. There was leftover Chinese food.

Matt's apartment held only piles of cartons and a beanbag chair. The bare walls glared white in the white light of the ceiling globe. There were no shadows. On one of the cartons the word
Records
had been written in a steady hand. 'I'm moving,” Matt said. “I'm leaving for Washington day after tomorrow.”

“Oh. Well, have a good trip.”

“You want a beer?” Matt asked.

“Sure.”

Matt went to the kitchen and returned with two beers. The light was steady and colorless as tap water. Enter this, Will told himself. Do it, do whatever happens, and then go. But the air resisted him. This room was the opposite of sex. He felt as if flashbulbs were exploding in his face. He and Matt stood together, drinking their beers. Will felt lost in his clothes. His shoes seemed enormous. It occurred to him that he and Matt had misunderstood each other. Matt had somehow failed to realize that he'd gone to a gay bar. He had simply invited Will up for a comradely beer before he slipped out of his old life and into the new. That idea appealed to Will—he wouldn't need to risk sex with someone so remote and well made.

“What kind of job have you got?” Will asked.

“I can't tell you my boss's name. But he's very high in government, and I'm going to be his personal assistant. It's a great job. I'm lucky.”

“That's good. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

They finished their beers. Matt turned his bottle over in his hand and said, “I haven't done this much. This is really kind of new to me.”

“Oh,” Will said. “You're, like, just coming out?”

Matt raised his shoulders, hefted the bottle in his hand, and Will believed he understood. Here was the sullen unnamed thing, the clumsiness. Everything opened; everything made sense. Matt was new. He'd turned up in the bar because he didn't know what bar to go to—he'd probably heard the name somewhere. An old fear lived inside that perfect body. Finally, after years of deception, before he left his old life and entered a new one, Matt was going to let his desires show. A spasm of tenderness rose in Will's throat.

“It's hard, isn't it?” he said. “I mean, I was nervous as hell my first few times.”

Matt took a deep swig of his empty beer bottle. All right, Will thought. He stepped forward, put his arms around Matt's broad shoulders. This close, he could smell Matt's sweat mingled with the sweetness of his cologne. It occurred to him that a circle was completing itself. He had it in him now to be patient and generous, to help someone come around to himself. He said, “There's nothing to be afraid of. It's all goodness here. I mean, relax. I'll take care of everything.”

“Good,” Matt said, and his voice turned surprisingly harsh. He might have been granted something that was rightfully his, after a long and bitter fight.

“Do you still have a bed?” Will asked. “Or has it already gone to Washington?”

“It's in here,” Matt said.

He led Will into the next room, flicked a switch that filled it with the same light. The room contained a double bed, unmade, and more cartons. “Great,” Will said. “I mean, I'm glad to see the bed's still here.”

“You want to take my clothes off?” Matt said.

“Do you want me to?”

“I'm asking you.”

“Well, yeah. I do.”

Matt stood in the middle of the room and let himself be undressed. Will peeled off Matt's shirt, told him to sit on the bed so he could remove his shoes and socks. Matt asked, “You like this? You like taking a guy's clothes off?”