Gossip (12 page)

I spoke on the phone with Nancy a few nights after Nick’s public eruption, told her something about it, then was talking about the store when she abruptly asked, “Ralph, are you mad at me?”

“No.” I laughed nervously. “Should I be?”

“I don’t think so. It’s just that you’ve seemed slightly distant since your visit here. I was wondering if I unloaded too much of my shit and didn’t pay enough attention to yours.”

I assured her that I had no shit and was fine. “Hey, if I ever get mad at you, you’ll know.”

N
EW SNOW COVERED THE
streets the morning I caught a train in New York to catch the plane in Baltimore. New Jersey was a stark sketch of black factories in white marshes, white smoke against white skies. When my flight lifted off over Maryland, I saw frozen rivers and white rime around Chesapeake Bay, an arteriosclerosis of ice. Miles to the west, Washington was a faint vapor over a rough patch of earth. I sat in a window seat with another Palliser novel in my lap,
Phineas Redux,
which I’d begun on the train but didn’t even open now.

It was Friday. Bill had flown down Thursday. We were flying back together on Sunday. This was a new and worldly experience for me, to be brought a thousand miles for a weekend with a lover. And we were lovers, even if neither of us was in love.

Nevertheless, the future tense of travel and mild vertigo of being airborne fed a giddiness in my chest, a keen anticipation, a weightlessness like love. Or was it only lust? What did it matter so long as I enjoyed myself?

I had no romantic illusions. I’d learned years ago that love could be temporary and still be love. I enjoyed falling in love yet knew not to trust it. It began as an elation of pure possibility, a wishful thinking so strong that it dissolved the other person. It was like falling in love with light and air, which could be fun until the dream broke in the soft fact of another ego. Two or three times in my life, the fact of the other person had been there from the start. He seemed more real than I was and
I
dissolved in possibility. There’d been traces of that with Nick, although I’d been drawn at the time not just to Nick but to the life he represented.

I didn’t really believe that I was in love with Bill. Today, however, in a steady march of sunlit clouds high above the Carolinas, I wondered again if he was in love with me, something I never wished except when I thought I could return it.

Even requited, such love would be foolish, messy and brief. Unless it changed Bill’s politics. That fantasy was back, larger than before, giving value to lust, turning sex with a Republican from a self-betrayal to a good deed, a moral rescue. Bill went against his best interests by seeing me. Maybe he wanted to be changed.

But what if love changed
me?
Could it rearrange and corrupt
my
identity? Oddly enough, that scenario wasn’t frightening, but produced a nasty thrill. As if I were bored with who I was and enjoyed the impossible notion of becoming someone new.

Idle notions, transitory thoughts, ideas you entertain only in transit. Such plot twists seemed no more binding of me than those in the fat paperback in my lap. I amused myself with my own private novel, playing with abstract emotions, treating them as make-believe, forgetting that love often begins as just another story you tell yourself in private.

The plane began its descent and I stopped playing at love to fasten my seat belt. Terra cotta rooftops, quill-like palm trees and a green baize golf course raced beneath the wing, their colors a shock after months of monochrome.

The long carpeted corridor from the gate was full of tanned old people in cheerful prints and plaids. I was a child of winter with my superfluous duffel coat under my arm.

I saw him before he saw me. He sat against a tubbed orange tree outside the metal detectors, in khakis and polo shirt, his skin so pale that he stood out like a white crow. His eyes were lowered, lost in thought. Who would he be this time?

He looked up and blinked in his glasses, as if asking himself a similar question about me. His body responded before his face, pitching forward a split second before a grin appeared.

“Welcome to Miami.” He held out one hand; then the other.

I embraced him. His hesitance warned me against kissing him, but he smelled so good, like hotel linen, that I sneaked a kiss on his neck.

He gently broke the embrace. “Can I carry something? I rented a car. It’s parked out front. It’s good to see you.”

I gave him my coat and followed, wondering why I felt slightly disappointed, what else I had hoped to feel.

“It’s good to see you,” he repeated. “I was afraid you might change your mind at the last minute.”

“Oh no. I wasn’t going to miss this for the world. The chance to see you again, in a whole new setting.”

“Good. Very good. I am so glad you came, Ralph.”

Catching his little notes of protest, I tried to joke them away. “I assume we both will this weekend. Many times.”

His smile was uneasy, his laugh as tight as the warning chirp of his Powerbook. He wanted me to want more than sex? He was bored with the affair? Was I reading too much into every detail?

Outdoors in the covered walkway to the car park, the air was not just warm but tactile, fluffy handfuls of vacant space.

“We’re not staying at the convention hotel,” he said as he unlocked the door on my side of the car. “But in South Beach. It’s nicer. I’ll keep you away from the big bad Republicans.”

“But I want to see big bad Republicans. I want to hear your presentation and catch some of this conference.” It was my political justification for coming. I was here for knowledge. Know thy enemy, I told myself, which might not include Bill.

He was too busy navigating the car to answer immediately. “I’d rather you didn’t, Ralph. Firstly, I’m nervous enough without knowing that you’re in the audience. And secondly, this conference is more, uh, conservative than I expected. You wouldn’t like it. I’m not sure I like it.”

Maybe I hadn’t been fooling myself; maybe he did want to be changed. “So what does AFC stand for?”

“American Family Coalition.”

“That’s the Christian right, right?”

“Oh yes. The right right. Most definitely.” He glanced at me. “How did you know?”

“You mean you didn’t?” I hadn’t heard of them, but “family” was always the giveaway.

“No. I meant how did you know this was the AFC?”

“You told me, didn’t you?” He hadn’t. I knew it from reading his Powerbook.

“I thought I was careful not to. Because, to be frank, I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

But I was already on the slippery slope; I could slide into the far right with no additional guilt. I was pleased that Bill respected my beliefs enough to want to keep this from me.

“That’s where I’ll be tomorrow,” he said when we were on the highway, pointing out downtown Miami, a Sunbelt skyline like a bar graph. “I have a presentation in the morning. A panel in the afternoon. But I’m all yours tonight and tomorrow night and all day Sunday before we fly back. So you don’t need to make yourself unwelcome on the chance that we might have time for lunch. Or so you can see me make an ass of myself. If they even let you in.”

“It’s closed to the public?”

He shrugged. “You’re not registered. They might think you’re a potential troublemaker with that haircut.”

I hadn’t considered that when I took the electric razor to my head this morning. Considering it now, I saw another reason for Bill’s request. “Will you get in trouble if you’re seen with someone who looks like me?”

“No. Probably not. Oh I don’t know,” he declared, offended by the idea. “I hadn’t thought that. If I truly thought that, would I have wanted you here?”

“No, I guess not,” I admitted.

We started across a causeway over the turquoise bay that would lie between us and the righteous Christians, between Bill in bed and Bill at a podium. He
had
taken a risk in bringing me to Miami. I decided not to press the issue, to be patient.

The causeway ended in a whitewashed resort town against a low horizon. We drove down an oceanside street lined with small beveled hotels the color of sea taffy. The first few were delightful, but the eye quickly wearied of Art Deco; it was the planet of retired decorators. Bill parked in a side street by a squat reptilian palm tree like a prehistoric bird. A school of muscle boys in sunglasses flew past on Rollerblades as we walked around to the front of the hotel. The end of the day was balmy, the air sensual, but Bill’s body English, the stiffness of spine and shoulders, suggested he was not sensually at home today.

Up in his room, I dumped my bag in the corner, glanced at yet another king-sized bed, then went to the window to look at the ocean. The beach was wide and rumpled, the Atlantic a dark blue as the afternoon sky turned a powdery, dusky blue.

“Nice, isn’t it?” said Bill while he hung up my coat. “There’s a big Jacuzzi in the bathroom. Which I haven’t used yet. We can help ourselves to snacks and beverages in the little fridge. Would you care for a beverage?”

I asked for seltzer. He busied himself with ice and glasses while I looked down at people on the street, feeling not like a lover but an inconvenient guest.

He came up behind me and set the glasses on a table. He pressed against my back and wrapped his arms around my chest.

“Oh, but it’s good to have you here,” he said, with a sadness that finally gave the phrase weight.

I turned and kissed his mouth, at the window where anyone could see us. I was relieved to be kissing him again.

He nibbled timidly. “I should warn you,” he whispered. “I’m distracted about tomorrow. I don’t know how in the mood I’ll be.”

“Do you want to wait until later?” I offered insincerely, rubbing the seat of his pants.

“No, I want to now. But you should know, I might seem different.”

“I can work with that.”

And he was different. It made me different. We hurried through the neck-and-strip phase to get to the heart of the matter; there were no breathless smiles over the first thrill of skin-deep nudity. We twisted, rubbed and pressed in an attempt to squeeze ourselves back into our skin. The warm breeze blowing through our middles brought the sounds of traffic and pedestrians into the room. Anyone watching us might think this was the same ballroom dance of sex as before, but inside the act it felt different, deeper, hungrier.

I was doing him with my mouth, hand and finger—he hadn’t wanted me there before—when he gripped the back of my neck and breathlessly said, “I want you—to fuck me.”

“I didn’t bring condoms.”

“Buy some. Tomorrow. Will you?”

“Yeah,” I said, not wanting to argue, wanting only to return to the inside-out shapes in my face: the bared throat of his erection, the balls against my palm, the buried “mouse” rolling under my fingertip.

The shoulders of his cock swelled; his sphincter swallowed. I uncorked him and he came. His inhaled cries sounded like sobs. “Don’t stop, don’t stop!” he pleaded after he finished and I was rubbing him raw.

But even orgasm failed to calm him. He went straight at me again, frantically clutching and sucking, then pumping with his fist. “Gently, gently,” I whispered. I pulled him to my side and buried my nose in his hair. I released a long, deep sigh of relief, caught my breath, and smiled.

Bill slowly sat up, looking at my torso, unsure what else to do with me. He frowned at the puddle around my navel. He abruptly bent down and rubbed his grimace in the spill, angrily smearing closed lips and eyelids in me. I grabbed his head to stop him.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine. I’m excellent. It’s good to have you here.”

“Good to be here,” I said worriedly. I brushed the hair off his damp forehead and wiped his face with the sheet.

He did not want to snuggle and talk, but jumped up, insisting we try the heart-shaped Jacuzzi. He made the water as hot as we could stand. He turned on the tanning light and the wainscotted closet glowed like a toaster oven. We sat side by side in twin ventricles of swirling heat that came up to our nipples, feeling nothing when our knees touched. With his eyes closed and head tilted back, Bill finally relaxed, the water burning away whatever it was that sex hadn’t.

“Feel better?” I asked.

“Much,” he claimed.

“What’s bothering you?”

“Nothing. I feel fine.”

“Do you feel bad about bringing me here?”

“No. I’m glad to have you here.”

But I persisted. “Then do you feel strange about being with me tonight, and getting thrown to the Christians tomorrow?”

“I’m not being
thrown
to them,” he grumbled. “I support them. Most of the time. They have nothing to do with you, Ralph. You have nothing to do with them.” An eye peeked and closed. “Like I said, if I’m preoccupied, it’s stage fright. I’ve never appeared in public. I’m worried I’ll make an ass of myself.”

No, it was more than that. He didn’t understand his own guilty dissonance. “What do you have to do?”

“Read from my book. Take questions from the audience.”

“Then you have nothing to fear. They’ll love anything bad you say about Clinton.” I couldn’t believe I said that. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

“They’ll laugh at me. It’s what I fear most in life. That people will laugh at me.”

“There’re worse things than being laughed at.”

“Not for me.”

I wasn’t surprised. Bill’s undeveloped sense of humor left him deaf to other people’s irony, and unprotected with jokes at his expense.

“I have a theory,” I said. “About people revealing their true character by what they fear.”

“That doesn’t define me,” Bill muttered. “Everyone’s afraid of being laughed at.”

“But different people have different key fears. I’ve got one friend who’s terrified of being depressed. Another who’s afraid of being ineffectual. Another who’s afraid of—” I was going to say death, but everyone feared death, and I didn’t know how often Peter thought about it.

“What fear defines you?” Bill said.

“I don’t know. Maybe hurting people. Deliberately or by accident. Physically or emotionally.”