Gossip (13 page)

“Yeah?” He lifted his head to stare at me.

And it did sound ridiculous when said aloud, sentimental and self-congratulatory. “Okay. The theory works only when somebody else names your fear. We can’t name our own. We only name what we
like
to think is our defining fear.”

Bill closed his eyes and leaned back. “You don’t have to worry about hurting my feelings. Just be patient until I get through tomorrow. I’ll be myself again tomorrow night.”

“Well, you’re not bad company in the meantime,” I claimed.

Patches of blue and pink neon spilled from the open fronts of bars and restaurants along the ocean. The colored shadows of potted palms were cast on a young crowd jostling up and down the sidewalk: European tourists, American models, beautiful women in high-heeled sandals, handsome men with butts like the jacked-up rears of hot rods, and us.

Out on the street, Bill became more himself again—only what was his true self? He made his old cheerfulness flow in talk about Miami and the movies we’d seen over the past month. He remained distracted behind his smiles, yet I patiently accepted that, much to my surprise. I’d come down here with fantasies and fears about the drama of love, only to find myself content with friendly courtesy.

We ate dinner in a sidewalk café. When I reached over to take a bit of the chicken tarragon salad that Bill said was so delicious, he stiffened, as if I’d just groped him in public, then was guilty over his distress. When we went for a walk on the dark, surfless, deserted beach, he held my hand for a minute, until his fingers grew sweaty and we both let go.

“Do you like your shadow?” he asked. “I hate mine. My shadow looks like a cello.”

I did not laugh, but assured him his shadow was fine. We tried identifying constellations and returned to the hotel.

After brushing his teeth, Bill announced, “Do you mind if we just sleep tonight? I’m not in a frisky mood.”

I’d expected that. “No problem. It’s you being in the mood that puts me in the mood.”

He had pajamas and actually wore them, full-length cotton with blue stripes. He frowned when I shucked my briefs to climb in nude, but sat up so I could slip an arm around him. He turned off the light and laid his head on my shoulder as before, holding my teddy bear arm across his chest.

“I feel like I’m in bed with my father,” I muttered.

“Don’t say that! What an awful thing to say.”

“Your pajamas,” I explained. “Can you sleep like this?”

“We’ll see. If I end up on the other side, don’t be offended.”

“I won’t.” I took strange pride over sharing a bed with Bill without lust, pleased to discover that I didn’t need to anesthetize myself with sex to be with him. I assumed my satisfaction would wear off and I’d have to roll away to go to sleep. But very quickly, the hours of travel, the change of season and all my chameleon thinking caught up with me. The ocean air dissolved the street noise and the body beside me.

I strolled into an overheated hall full of gaslight and men in ink black frock coats. The men held gloves and stovepipe hats at their sides while they discussed a new bill in Parliament. I was thrilled to eavesdrop in the corridors of power, until I realized that I wasn’t dressed for the occasion. I was naked. I panicked, cupped my hands over my privates. I considered snatching hats to cover myself fore and aft so I could get to the cloakroom where I seemed to have left my clothes. But then I understood: Nobody noticed me. I was invisible. These proper English gentlemen looked straight through me. Or did they only pretend to look through me? A naked queer was too incongruous to be acknowledged in a scene from Trollope. Whether my invisibility was real or a social fiction, I decided to take advantage of it. I wandered freely among their important conversations, regretting only that I had no pockets where I could put my hands. A young, beardless fellow with black-rimmed glasses suddenly stared at me; he turned away, blushing.

“Wake up! Get up! They’re here!”

Hands jerked my shoulders. He shouted in my ear.

“Get dressed. Get some clothes on. Please. We can’t let them see you like this.”

“Who?” I bolted up and wildly looked around, seeing a hotel room in Miami Beach, recognizing the frightened man in my bed.

“Please, please,” he pleaded. “I know they’ve seen us, but—if I can make them understand. If I can explain.”

“There’s nobody here. You were dreaming, Bill. Just us.”

I put my arm around him, but he threw it off.

“Yes? What? We’re somewhere else?” He stared at me, shoved my shoulder and found it was real. “Oh God.” He fell back on his pillow. “Only a dream. A nightmare. Jesus. The door’s locked?”

“It’s locked. But there’s nobody out there.” Yet I couldn’t shake the idea that the hall was full of frock-coated politicians from my own dream. “Who did you think was in the room?”

He lay there catching his breath. “What a stupid dream.

Nobody particular. Truly. Nobody at all. Just people.” And almost instantly, he was asleep again.

I remained propped on an elbow, watching his face subside into peace, wondering who his enemies were, wanting to know what I could do to protect him.

W
E WERE UP EARLY THE
next morning. I worked to put Bill at ease while he got dressed, assuring him he’d do fine, even helping him with his tie. My support was sincere, but with an ulterior motive. I waited until I walked him out to his car before trying again.

“I promise not to go to your presentation. But I’d really like to see some of this. Can’t I drop by? If you run into me and can’t say hello, I’ll understand.”

“No, Ralph. If there’s any chance I might see you, I’ll be tense all day. Promise you won’t. Please. Hang out on the beach. Enjoy yourself.”

“All right. If that’s what you want. I brought a fat book.”

He looked quite adult in his blue suit, burgundy suspenders and striped tie, although his briefcase bulged like a school bookbag. “Good luck,” I told him. “They’ll love you. See you at four.” Unable to kiss him on the street, I reached under his jacket and gave his suspender a hard snap. Then I went inside and asked at the desk where one could catch a bus to the mainland.

Shaggy palms lined the boulevard in downtown Miami outside a concrete fortress the color of a wasp nest. “Welcome American Family,” declared the marquee of the Omni Hotel and Convention Center.

They trooped into the hotel’s street entrance, middle-aged and elderly couples, everyone eager, chatty and clean. Packed with a dozen in the elevator, I was overcome by an aroma of fresh ironing.

There were hundreds more upstairs in the echoing gray lobby of the convention hall. I was glad they were so many; it decreased my chances of running into Bill. I regretted lying to him, but I did need to see this. I would tell him I’d been here, later, when no harm came of my visit. He should be flattered. I hid my blatant head with the baseball cap that I never wore in New York. Turned forward, the cap signified only a love of sport. I wore a plaid shirt and tweed jacket, which made me look like a liberal academic, but it was the best I could manage. I feared I stood out like a Communist flag, yet nobody asked to see my pass, nobody gave me a dirty look. I was back in last night’s dream of invisibility, until a faintly butch grandmother thrust a pamphlet in my hand—“Death, Taxes and Eternal Life”—and stuck a button in my lapel—“Jesus Does Not Vote Democrat”—presumably less sacrilegious than claiming he voted Republican. “I’m supposed to ask for a dollar donation,” she drawled. “But I’m too full of glory today.”

Everyone was beaming, everyone looked friendly. I did not expect
Triumph of the Will,
but this was more neighborly than I’d anticipated, like our shopping mall back home on a Sunday afternoon, people dropping by after church, others coming in from the golf course. The chief differences were the scarcity of black faces and the complete absence of children. Well, you couldn’t expose the kids to what might be discussed at something called the American Family Coalition. I wanted to see absurdities, but knew that toxic pastels and an occasional Wookie hairdo were not the enemy. The handful of twenty-somethings had a too-good-to-be-true possessed look, yet the elderly majority seemed perfectly human.

Finding a red, white and blue brochure for the conference in the trash, I hunted through the listings to see where Bill was. “11:00
A.M.
The Okeechobee Room. ‘Everything You Wanted to Know About Bill and Hillary. And Were Not Afraid to Ask.’ William O’Connor of
American Truths
reads from his forthcoming exposé of the Clinton administration,
The Regiment of Women.”

That was the title? Another Shakespeare allusion? In other circumstances, I’d assume it was feminist, but here it worried me. The presentation began in ten minutes. Could I risk exposure by looking in? The Okeechobee Room sounded too small for me to sit in a corner unnoticed. Perhaps I could stand outside the door.

The conference rooms were on the mezzanine. Riding up the escalator with a column of churchgoers, I turned to watch the pastel mob through the gauze stripes of an American flag hung from the ceiling. I turned around as the next floor came into view—just in time to see Bill.

He stood in profile against jungle wallpaper, twenty feet away, talking to a man in a gray suit. I stood paralyzed on the escalator that carried me toward them, staring at Bill, his fat briefcase in both arms, his head respectfully bowed to a short, thick, fiftyish fellow with a chin beard.

I saw them for three seconds, so intensely that they registered like a snapshot. Then I jerked my cap over my eyes, stepped off the escalator, quickly turned and jumped on the escalator going down. The motor of the stairs hummed in my knees. My heart pounded so hard that I feared I wouldn’t hear him call out my name. I reached the main floor and stepped away, catching my breath and looking up at the balcony to see if he came to the parapet to look for me. He didn’t. He hadn’t seen me. I was safe.

I began to laugh at my slapstick escape and fright. What was I afraid of? I just didn’t want to spook Bill before his talk, even if I disapproved of what he said. Knowing he’d be occupied for the next hour, I felt free to stay and explore.

Nothing was happening in the ballroom auditorium. A lone woman dozed in the acres of peach plush chairs. The brochure listed a plenary session for noon: “Meet the Leaders of Tomorrow.” I saw a rest room in the back and suddenly needed to pee. I opened the door on the sound of a choir singing “Rock of Ages.” Two men stood at the marble sink with a tape recorder; the thin, sandy man in khaki and wire rims was praying.

“Excuse me.” I started to back out on what seemed a very intimate act.

“No. Please,” said the nonpraying man, gesturing toward the toilets in the rear.

I nodded and hurried past as the comforter laid his hand on the sandy man’s head.

“Let the Spirit be with Claude in his time of need. Let his words persuade the multitudes. We beseech thee, Lord….”

Peeing was difficult with that going on outside my stall. I flushed before I realized it might sound disrespectful. When I came out, they were still serenely at it. Such solid, old-fashioned faith seemed oddly heroic in these glitzy trappings.

Know thy enemy, know thy enemy, I repeated to myself, my mantra for the weekend. I was a fly on the wall of a realm that people like Nick and Maura Morris knew only by hearsay.

I wandered into a hall lined with booths selling books, bumper stickers and T-shirts:
Get Rich While You Sleep,
“Heil Hillary” and, in Coca-Cola lettering, “Jesus Christ: He’s the Real Thing.” Raised as an Episcopalian, the easiest religion in the world to shed, I could still be amazed by the sacrilege of believers. The one stone I noticed being thrown at my kind was on a video playing in the
700 Club
booth, the voice of Pat Robertson declaring, “We must turn back Bill Clinton’s socialist agenda,” over an image of two men holding hands.

A display of real books caught my eye, titles by John Henry Newman and other Brits on the table of a Catholic publisher. I took up an edition of prose by Gerard Manley Hopkins that I’d never seen before. The right at least pretended to read good literature. A balding man in bifocals was perusing
Everlasting Man
by G. K. Chesterton. He glanced over, noticing my book while I noticed his.

“Ah, Hopkins!” he said in a warm, husky voice. “Hopkins is great. You like Hopkins?”

“I know his poetry, but not his prose.” I also knew the poet-priest was said to be gay, but didn’t think this the time or place to mention that.

“You know Chesterton?” the man asked eagerly. “You should. Great prose, strong feeling.” He thrust the book on me, as if expecting me to read it then and there. “Unafraid of intellect. Intellect is not the enemy. Frank Calabrese,” he said, holding out a pale, leopard-spotted hand.

“Ralph Eckhart,” I replied. He had a gentle handshake.

“You down from Lejeune, Ralph? I thought at first you might be at the Citadel, but you’re too old to be a cadet. When you get to be my age, all young men are youths.”

So that was why my shaved head didn’t alarm anyone. Context was all, and in their context I must be in the military. “Yes, sir. Lejeune,” I mumbled, opening his book.

“Quite a gathering of the tribe, this. You down alone or with family, Ralph?”

“Alone.” He stood quite close to me, closer than straight men usually stand to strangers. Was this courtly gentleman trying to pick me up?

“Chesterton was great pals with Hilaire Belloc, you know. They went for hikes in the country, stopping at pubs and inns along the way. Theirs was a hearty, sensual religion.”

This was perfect: I was being hit on among the Christians, and over G. K. Chesterton.

“Irene!” he called out. “C’mere. I’ve met someone else.”

A woman with tight gray hair and the solidity of a stuffed chair glided over. “Hello?” she said uncertainly.

“Ralph here is a serviceman who
reads.
He knows Hopkins. I’m selling him on Chesterton.”

She had fretful eyes and a falcon-beak nose. She smiled weakly. “Don’t mind my husband. He has so few people in Kenosha to talk books to that he can come on a little strong.”