Buddies (14 page)

“I was mean to Ray at tea.”

He held me at arm’s length. “You want Cream of Wheat or a switching?”

“Maybe he is genuine and maybe he isn’t, and it’s absolutely none of my business. I admit it. But I thought of something.
Why
would he pretend to be a homeless, dumb kid if he isn’t one? Why would a gay play gringo
in
the gay world? A homosexual ditchdigger or carpenter would have to play gringo because his culture runs on the gringo code. But Ray’s in the gay world. It makes no sense.”

“You should tell him you’re sorry. I do believe he’s very sensitive.”

“Straights have no feelings, Carlo.”

“
Gringos
have no feelings. Straights are something else.”

“Isn’t Ray a gringo, after all?”

“No. Gringos are tough. Like John Wayne or…”

“Jim Packer?”

He nodded. “I never met a porn star who wasn’t born tough.”

“Then what is Ray?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“Oh, come on.”

“Do you want some Cream of Wheat with maple syrup?”

“Can you make that here? With real maple syrup?”

“Sure.” He led me inside. “Their kitchen looks like the movie
Metropolis.
” As he got the fixings out of the cupboard, he said, “She’s probably praying for me right now. That’s what drove me away from them, back a while ago. And she knows that, but she prays all the harder.” He was almost murmuring. “I miss them,” he added, a highly accessible man.

*   *   *

The fluke that exploded Ray Holgrave’s act occurred a few Sundays after, on the beach at noon with the squad, gathered from our various houses, in full congress. A number of things were happening at once. Carlo and Kenny Reeves had just come up from the ocean and were getting everyone wet, Lionel was reading aloud from
Valmouth,
two visitors from the Grove were grousing at a strange nosy dog, and a straight couple had come up to ask Ray if he was the Mr. Hamill who was the graduate assistant of Dr. Copelman’s Hawthorne and Melville course at Bucknell two years before.

Ray said nothing, literally nothing. I couldn’t see his face.

Well, was he? they repeated. It was clear they thought he was.

Ray shook his head. Everyone else was watching and listening.

“Are you sure?” said the woman, laughing at the absurdity of the question. “Because you gave me an A on my
Marble Faun
paper and a B- on my
Confidence Man
paper. I wouldn’t forget the man who grades with that kind of enthusiasm.”

Ray looked at Dennis Savage. From behind, I saw his shoulders slide up into that tiny shrug of his.

“
Perry
Hamill?” the woman went on. “Really you look just like him.”

My eyes were boring into the back of Ray’s neck, but he didn’t turn. Nor would he yet speak, and the silence sounded rather loud.

“His name,” Dennis Savage finally said, “is Ray.”

“Well,” the woman told him, beginning to sense, and surprised by, the tension she had created. “You’ve got a twin brother named Perry walking around somewhere.”

I looked at Carlo, but he raised a hand, warding me off.

I looked at Dennis Savage, but he was looking exclusively at Ray.

I looked at everyone else, but they couldn’t have cared less. Kenny Reeves put a wet hand on Lionel’s neck and made him jump; the two Grove people were calling the strange nosy dog bad names in French; and the collegiate couple moved on down the beach.

I cleared my throat.

“In
The House of the Seven Gables,
” I began, “there’s a character named Maule who takes a pseudonym. Has anyone present read Hawthorne’s
The House of the Seven Gables?
Anyway, would someone like to guess what pseudonym this guy named Maule takes in Hawthorne’s
The House of the Seven Gables?
”

Ray turned around to see me, and it was the same ungrudging, mildly questioning gaze he invariably—almost invariably—presented.

I decided I must not go on, because I was being churlish and intrusive and boring; and what did it prove, anyway? Ray was Ray, as sure as Dick Hallbeck was Jim Packer—you see the problem? Ray was
not
Ray. Because gringo is
there
and gay is
here,
yet every other time I turn around, the two are trading slave bracelets. All right, it’s not my business what Ray may have been in a former life. It’s not, all right. Okay.

But, for the record, the pseudonym that Maule takes in Hawthorne’s
The House of the Seven Gables
is Holgrave, and it’s pronounced with an Anglo flip on the vowel: Hahlgrave, just the way Ray pronounced it.

*   *   *

Ray never did find an apartment, but he was offered a job by a straight couple who, legend told, had made an unholy fortune in cocaine dealing and owned one of the flashiest houses on the water. Ray moved out on Dennis Savage and into his new berth simply by ambling along the boardwalk.

“Just as well,” said Dennis Savage. “I must admit, he did lack something in entertainment value.”

As it was over, anyway, I told Dennis Savage about the Hawthorne correspondence. He was amused but unimpressed. “It’s not conclusive,” he said. “What it is is slightly arresting.”

“You slept with him. You must know. Could he have been a teacher’s assistant at Bucknell? Please. Just think about it. Just know what it is. Just tell me.”

He considered. “Bucknell, maybe. But he couldn’t have hacked it at Hamilton.”

“Look, don’t play rep audition with me. Is he or isn’t he?”

“Is he what?”

“Jeepers,” I said. “You
know
what.”

“That’s just it. I don’t. And you don’t. Only Ray knows.”

“The story without end. We’ll never find out.”

“Why does it matter so much?”

“Because I believe culture is finite and taste is fixed. I’ve built life and art on those precepts. I have to know what is true in the world.”

“Why?”

“Because I am the sleuth!”

He shook his head. “When you write it all down,” he said, “I hope you make it clear to everyone just how irritating you’ve been about this.”

“You only say that,” I told him, “because you think this was Ray’s story. ‘The Tale of the Drifter,’ or something like.”

“Whose story was it, then, may I ask?”

“Mine.”

He just shook his head again.

*   *   *

Will we ever know what is true in the world, especially about sexual crossover? I guess not. The data is secret, the informants are inarticulate, and they are probably too shaken by their experiences to report fairly on them. We have to take the word of writers; but writers are mad. We try to be gallant, however. When I ran into Ray in the Pines Pantry near the end of the summer, I waited for him to check out, and, outside, apologized for baiting him.

“Sure, huh,” he said. “It’s all the same.”

“No,” I insisted. “No. I was tough around you, as you said. It’s unforgivable. So don’t forgive me. Just register my apology.”

“Hey, sure.” He put his hand on my head and patted me. “Sure, pal.” His hand slid down to my shoulders. “I know you were only doing that ’cause you liked me.”

I looked at him smiling away. The touch of his hand was forgiving, which suggests that he knew what I was doing, which tells us that he
is
more aware than he acts—but that way more madness lies. Life in New York.

“How are you getting on with your new people?” I asked.

“They’re okay. Kind of taking me twiceways. First she likes to screw me with a rubber thing, and then I go on and do him. It’s fun but it really makes my hole ache.”

I was still watching him, noting him down; I couldn’t help myself.

“Carlo’s really a great guy, isn’t he?” Ray said.

“We all think so.”

“I always liked that Carlo.”

Carlo had said, “Why don’t you ask him?” and so I did: “Ray, it couldn’t possibly make any difference now. You’re off to a new job with moneyed people, and Dennis Savage won’t mind anyway at this point, and I don’t know why, but
I
do, because I’m not sure I can live in a world in which Dick Hallbeck is interchangeable with Jim Packer. So look…”

Walking, we had reached the ferry plaza, where we would separate, he to the west and I to the east, and I glommed him one last time, and there were the utterly untroubled eyes of a man who doesn’t need what you have. But I asked anyway.

“Are you Perry Hamill, a former teaching assistant in a Hawthorne-Melville course at Bucknell?”

He smiled and gave the tiny shrug, and nodded me goodbye. He started off. I didn’t move. He sensed that, and, ten feet off, stopped and turned. Two men with their groceries standing at the harbor.

“Are you?” I said.

He smiled and looked me spang in the eye and whispered, as he turned to go, “Wouldn’st thou like to know?”

Uptown, Downtown

A tour through the gay metropolis.

My friend Lucky very recently made his first trip to New York. He saw it as a great theme park, an agglomeration not of neighborhoods where different cultures flower but of sectors where entertainments present themselves. The West Village was Gayland, Fourteenth Street Scuzz Avenue, the Lexington IRT Terror Train. Most impressive to Lucky was Midtown, which he termed Businessville.

“Wow,” he opined, as dashing men in dress kit stalked past us, dotted here and there with important-looking women. “It’s swank!” Lucky lives year round in a pair of jeans; for solemnities he may go as far as to don a T-shirt. “What do you call those things they’re wearing?”

“Suits.”

“No. The handkerchief in their high pockets.”

“We call those ‘quibbles,’” I replied, thinking fast.

“Do you ever wear a quibble?” he asked me, as we walked on. It’s petty to kid an Angeleno; too easy. But Lucky is so receptive to colorful trivia that it’s a form of sustenance, a way of making love to him. He dragged me out on long walks, from the two big museums bordering the Park down to Wall Street, from Sutton Place to Hell’s Kitchen. Every now and then I’d stop in front of some dreary brownstone and invent a backstory involving Theodore Roosevelt, Boss Tweed, Texas Guinan, and others such, as Lucky shivered at the closeness of history, the wonder of having a past compounded of closed systems fiercely abutting one another. Who was the hero, the villain, the dupe? Which was the risky, the wealthy, the happy district? Where were the theatres, the bordellos, the banks? Visitors always think New York is like their town, but bigger. New York is not like any other town. It is all dupes, all risky, and its own theatre. To be young, beautiful, and Angeleno is to know nothing of parish phenomena, of the advantages and penalties of helter-skelter sectorization, of the inevitability of epoch. When I first came to New York, the upper west side as a cultural place stopped dead at about Seventy-third Street; north of that, it was nothing but hardware stores straight to Poughkeepsie. Now it’s one great pecan pie as far as the eye sees.

Somewhere, Lucky heard the word “gentrification”—meaning instead of being overrun with roaches you’re overrun with Akitas—and he wants to see an example. I take him to Chelsea, but we find little evidence of Coming Up. “Where’s all the gents?” asks Lucky. He laughs. He has made a joke. But the many men in tank tops and net shirts grow rigidly sober as they pass us, reading Lucky’s stomach and thighs. There’s no fun in New York; everyone’s too busy cruising, the only activity common to all the sectors.

Lucky notices the general malaise. “I thought New York was like one big party.” It is; but no one’s invited. Some make an entire evening out of rejection, lining up outside discos to turn their facades into wailing walls; others scheme to learn the phone numbers of the great, and dial to thrill to a “Hello” they daren’t answer.

“Take me to the fun part,” Lucky urges.

“That’s not what New York is for,” I almost say. Then I think of the Madcap Heiress of Seventy-fourth Street, and decide it is time Lucky saw the east side.

*   *   *

The Madcap Heiress was born to clown looks as well as a fortune, and has played the one into a unique comix and the other into a credential of glamour. In the Village, guests are lavish presents to be unwrapped. On the west side, guests are the intelligentsia. At the Madcap Heiress’, guests are an audience to be charmed and scandalized. All queens are funny: because the only other thing they can be is bitter. But this queen is insightfully ridiculous, like Dali’s mustache. To be absurd in a sullen world is a surmise—as those Park Avenue tramps know, shouting lurid nonsense at the officers of the Corporation as they lope up the street in their ties each weekday evening.

The Madcap Heiress is thrilled to see us, but sighs profoundly as we step in. “Utterly worn out,” he says. “Crazy Bunny came for lunch and brought that awful Dizzy Wizard. The two of them rendered me helpless and then played with the toilet flusher till the whole apartment was…” Now he takes in Lucky. “Little Lamb, who made thee?”

Lucky had offered to put on a shirt for the east side, but I figured the Madcap Heiress would prefer him
al fresco.

“I like your quibble,” Lucky told him.

“Completely baffled.”

“He means your handkerchief,” I put in.

“Oh, my …
quibble,
yes. My … Crazy Bunny gave it to me, had you heard? For when I came back from safari. He lifted it from Bergdorf’s, there’s no doubt. Did you know I was on safari? Hunting and tracking or so?” He purrs, admiring Lucky. “Actually, I went on Jewish safari. Just like the real thing, except all the animals are in cages. Darling, who
is
the boy?”

“He’s my western friend Lucky.”

“Could I have seen you in a movie?” the Madcap Heiress asks him.

“Yes.”

I’m startled.

“
Cousins Who Rim During Shavuous,
or something?”

“Brotherly Love,”
Lucky corrects him amiably.

“A movie star in my apartment! Utterly floored!”

“You made porn?” I ask Lucky, before I can stop myself.

“Come see the famous view!” the Madcap Heiress cries. “You don’t have anything like this in the West! The Contessa Pigoletto came all the way from Milan for my famous view! Well, and for a certain Greek-American electrician. But still.”