People in Trouble (23 page)

"Are you gay?"
 
he asked smiling.

She didn't know what to say.

"Maybe."

"Well," he said, playing along.
 
"Have you ever been gay?"

"Oh yes," she said.
 
"By the way, is gay something you are or does it depend on who you're in bed with at that precise moment?"

"It depends on whose love helps you grow the most and is -most comforting to you given a state of nature."

"This isn't that social-construction-versus-essentialist argument that I've heard so much about, is it?"

"No," he said.
 
"It means, try thinking back to a woman you loved and never touched and then figure out why not."

"What are you, a therapist?"

"No," he said.
 
"I'm just one of those people you meet on a -bus ride somewhere who you will never see again, but who asks you memorable questions."

They laughed together and then each looked away at some thing else for a while.
 
Then they both turned back.

`I "I fell in love with an actress in the last play I worked on, before I left the theater.
 
The Blacks by Jean Genet.
 
Do you know it?"

"Of course."

The bus rolled on.
 
What had been jolting only minutes before -4was suddenly a smooth and comforting lull.

"I was ready to quit the whole scene, but as one last gesture I jumped at the chance to be Sandra's dresser for the first few -weeks of the run.
 
You have to be calm to be the dresser.
 
You catch the actress in her most vulnerable moment, coming off one emotion and preparing for the other.
 
You have to be so smooth and silent that you are one with her or just air.
 
You undress her.

You see her nude.
 
You cover her up again.
 
She doesn't look at you.

She is deep in thought.
 
One second later she belongs to everyone but right then she belongs only to you.

Kate could smell Sandra King's body right there on the bus, just the way she used to do every night zipping her dress up over those soft, brown breasts.

"One night we kissed.
 
I'd actually forgotten until this very moment that we had kissed.
 
But we did.
 
Thinking back on it she was probably gay.
 
It was harder to tell in those days.
 
In fact, I'm sure of it.

She was married but that never means anything.
 
Peter put the make on her, she told me.
 
But she wasn't interested.
 
She brushed him off over coffee."

"Who's Peter?"

"My husband."

"Oh, now I see."

He smiled again, very warmly.

"Peter always wants to be close to the women I'm attracted to.
 
It's a way of appropriating my experiences.
 
But she wasn't interested in him at all.
 
Not at all."

"Or in you."

I"That too."

-"My favorite thing about being gay," said the man on the bus, "is that there is something so starkly honest about it and so involved with people's secret lives.
 
I can be what straight people only imagine."' He played with the gold band on his right hand.

"My lover is waiting for me in Kingston.
 
Is that where you're going?

Maybe we can give you a lift."

"I have to change for another bus.
 
But, thank you."

"Well," he said, folding the paper under his arm.
 
"We are, after all, members of the same church.
 
Very few heterosexual women know about c/b/t.
 
If I'd thought you were really straight I would have said that my roommate is meeting me in Kingston."

"I love men too," she said, feeling much older than him.

I"Oh yes," he said, shifting his body away from hers, still smiling, but with less conviction.
 
From then on it was pure artifice.
 
They chatted a bit about books, then movies, but the moment between them had dissolved.

It was our gayness that connected us, she realized later.
 
Not --our love of men.
 
It is the danger that brings you together, makes you need each other and feel so close.

55

Kate leaned against the wall of the small bus station next to the water fountain.
 
She could see everything from that spot: who went into the bathroom and how long it took them to come out.

She could tell who was smoking cigarettes and who was smoking pot.

She could hear every telephone conversation.

Kate picked the chocolate coating off a candy bar with her teeth.
 
It suddenly flashed in her mind that her relationship with Peter might not last forever.
 
Her response was a tiny terror.
 
She lost her cool.
 
It had snuck up on her like a shadow, without any premeditation, and then passed with no imaginable picture.

-One drizzling night she and Peter had come out of the subway and she'd spotted Molly walking ahead of them on the other side of the street.

"I think he meant space-aged in the Baudrillard sense of the word," Peter was saying.
 
"As generically modern and techno T logical, not exclusively pertaining to rocket ships, although not completely independent of it either."

Molly had looked so solid.
 
Her shoulders were squared and she looked tough, completely in charge.
 
It was late and dark but she didn't rush with fear, just kept on steadily from an internal power that compensated for size and caste.
 
Kate had watched herself with Peter.

They were loud and obvious.
 
They moved all over the sidewalk and said anything they liked.
 
At the same time Molly was aware of every presence and event in her path and made herself invisible to all of it.

She was quiet, like one of the buildings.
 
She was a shadow on a wet street.

"Operator," said a balding man in a light blue suit, "I'd like to charge this to my company's calling card."

Kate took a sip of water.

"I'd like to charge this to calling card 212-555-9814-3051."

Kate said it again to herself: "212-555-9814-3051."

She said it one more time as she walked slowly into the ladies' room and scrawled it on a piece of toilet tissue.

It was at a recent meeting that James and Daisy had asked for credit card numbers.
 
Justice divided up into search committees to make the collection more systematic.
 
There was a whole caucus of waiters working in expensive restaurants who could save the carbons from processed charge card forms.
 
There were lovers of the dead and dying and the dying themselves who hadn't gotten around to canceling their plastic.
 
There were the sick but still surviving who promised to fill out all the forms being passed around the room.
 
And there was a battalion of travelers who volunteered to hang out around pay phones in airports with open ears.

"Let AT&T pay for the phone revolution," Daisy said.

-"Transatlantic phone sex?"
 
asked Fabian, who considered it his personal responsibility to ensure that every Justice project was sex-affirmative.

Kate waited for the guy in the blue suit to disappear, then she dialed the operator.

"I'd like to charge this to my company's calling card," she said.
 
Her skin was tingling.
 
She had never done anything like this before.

Peter and Kate had often prided themselves on how radical they were.

They were artists, after all, and not stockbrokers.
 
They'd never been rich, although they weren t working shit jobs either, but they'd never had children or bought a coop.
 
Their lifestyle was their politics in action.
 
But, standing in a sea-foam-green bus station in rural New York, that all seemed rather superficial.
 
She realized, waiting for the operator to complete the call, that there was something repulsive at the base of this kind of thinking.

"We have fundamentally different values," Molly had told her one day.

"Because you hate men and I see their humanity?"
 
Kate answered.

"That's not exactly how I would put it."

"Well," Kate said sometime later in that conversation, "I don't think we're as far apart as you say.
 
I mean, when the shit comes down, we'll both be on the same side of the barricades."

"The shit is already down."

"I mean when people are dying in the streets."

"Kate, people are dying in the streets.
 
It's not the movies, where the world divides into freedom fighters and brownshirts.

Here in New York City there are people who take action and people who do nothing.
 
Doing nothing is a position.
 
It means giving approval without having to actively say so."

"212," Kate said into the phone: "212-555-9814-3051."

It took only a minute, it was so easy.

I"Hello?"

"Hello, Scottie?
 
This is Kate.
 
I didn't expect you to answer the phone."

"Yeah, I got out early."

It was the third time Scott had been in Sinai since the beginning of spring.
 
It wasn't his skin this month.
 
This month it was pneumocystis.
 
She had been prepared that time, walking into the hospital room to see silvery blue oxygen tubes going into his nose.

"Scott?"

I"Yes."

I"212-555-9814-3051."

"Great," he said.
 
"That's the seventieth number we've gotten in.
 
The phone codes are beating out Diners Club four to one.
 
Will you be back on Monday?
 
That's credit card mobilization day."

"I think so.
 
Scott?"

"Yes?"

"Sometimes a person has to stop talking about art for a moment and take a look around."

"I know," he said.
 
"I know exactly what you mean."

56

There was a man on Second Avenue wearing a sign that said I Hate Jesus Christ.
 
Whenever someone walked by he would tell them, "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal enemy.
 
I have been badly hurt by Christianity this year.
 
This has not been a good year for me and the Christians."

Then there were the guys on the corner selling raffles to "help stop drug abuse."
 
Peter wanted to stop drug abuse but he couldn't be sure that this was the most effective way.
 
So he had to say no.
 
Then the kids selling got really frustrated and screamed out after him, "What's the matter, you like drug abuse?"
 
So he knew immediately that he had made the right decision.

Peter was glad that Kate was out of his hair for a few days.

She was really annoying him.
 
If she wanted more independence, let her have it.
 
He felt like haying a few days in Manhattan on his own.
 
He felt like a sailor.
 
He could go anywhere he wanted t and do anything he wanted and no one would know that he had done it.

The first thing that happened was that he talked much less.

Whenever he was in the house he had no one to talk to, so he tried to think about intellectual things, about art matters, but there was no one to talk them over with, so he ended up thinking about what he was feeling because there was no way to avoid it.

There was no distraction.
 
That's when he started feeling like he wanted revenge.

He ate in restaurants because it was easier and that way nothing had to be planned.
 
During meals he would talk to the waiter or the guy sitting next to him at the counter.
 
He watched TV.
 
He made phone calls to old friends and to his brother, who was teaching math in Ann Arbor.
 
He went running for hours.

Initially Peter's goal was Central Park, but something led him off the track.
 
Officially it may have been the late-June hordes of tourists lining the avenues or the heat or too much car exhaust.

But when he found himself deciding to take a rest, just about the time he arrived in front of Ronald Horne's Castle, he had returned to the scene of the crime.
 
This is where Kate had really betrayed him.
 
This was the lobby where she joined the other side.
 
He sat down on an alligator-skin sofa.
 
This is where she had humiliated him on television by pretending to be gay.