How Long Has This Been Going On (18 page)

"I just don't see keeping you on here if you're going to duck out on me all the time."

"Want me to quit?"

"Nope."

The Kid was getting into his Bombasta outfit, the black sheath. "I'm going to have to find another of these," he was muttering. "The laundry bills are killing me."

Lois said, "I want you to sign a contract. So we always know where you are."

The Kid thought it over for maybe three seconds. Then he said no.

"Why not?"

"Freedom."

"Yeah, freedom to drive me wild annoyed with, like, are you here next week or not?"

"Tell you what," said the Kid, staring into the mirror as he painted his Hps. "You cast around for someone good enough to replace me. You find him, let me know. Then we'll discuss whether I'll sign a contract or take off. But as long as I'm the best piece you can show, I feel I should keep myself liquid, you know?"

"That's a deal."

Elaine was in Jill's that night, and when Lois came out front, Elaine announced that she would chain herself to the bar in the manner of the English suffragettes if Lois didn't free her from the lawyer and let her return to barmaiding at Jill's.

"'Barmaid,'" Lois scoffed. "The word is 'waitress.'"

"Is that a yes?"

"Why don't you stay home and write stories like I asked you?"

"I intend to write," Elaine replied. "But I need a job, too."

"Shit," Lois said.

The beauteous Laura Robertson knew that nothing mattered as much as breaking hearts at the dance. Laura lived to dismay and dismayed to live; she fed off the envy and admiration of others as a crocodile feeds, and she felt no more guilty. She knew how the angles of the tango showed off her calves, and how expertly the lindy flattered her rippling

"Garbage," said Elaine aloud, tearing the page out of her notebook.

Jeremy was the ideal young man—handsome, shrewd, and determined. The girls fluttered like buttercups in a zephyr when he passed, wondering which he would choose, and when.

But Jeremy was unusual. He said he wanted a prima donna, and would wait as long as he had to.

Everyone wondered what this must portend. Then Elvira came to town, with her

"Oh, Christ," Elaine shouted, ripping the page out and crumpling it to join the pile of crumpled pages in the wastebasket. "Jesus, this is cockeyed!"

Lawyers are crafty, and this lawyer—fat, ordinary, and satisfied—made the fox look like Br'er Bear. Oh, this lawyer! He bides his time. He waits for you to accustom yourself to his rhythms—his entrances, his summonses, his pacings as he shouts out a letter. He waits for months.

But he doesn't pounce. Nor does he seduce. This one
alludes.
He alludes to dinner, to a motel, to

This is closer, Elaine thought. This I believe.

In fact, Elaine and Lois developed this new way of Being Together in which Lois knocked around the house, neatening, cleaning, and even repainting while Elaine transcribed her longhand first drafts onto her Remington.

"Read me some of that," Lois would say, to encourage Elaine.

"When it's finished," Elaine would reply.

There was silence then, a densely occupied pause of some kind, and Elaine turned around to find Lois just sitting and watching her.

"You look so cagey," Elaine said.

"I like seeing you like that."

"Like what?"

"Creative. What's that book?"

"It contains the names of the staff and the addresses of all the publishers in—"

"So you
will
send this story out!"

"I maybe will."

After much thought, Frank decided that Around the World was his favorite thing to do. Fucking was great, but a lot of guys wouldn't let him top them. They often seemed surprised that he would even ask. This one really sharp-looking guy—a real gent in a suit, whom Frank met when Move For Your Life hauled a small realty office from Glendale to downtown—told Frank with a suave sneer, "That's for animals."

It wasn't easy to find a good Around the Worlder, either. Jake turned out to be a complete bust at it. "I have to lick your
what?"
he said. Frank told him he could skip that part, but Jake wasn't much of a sucker, either.

Of course, there was this much larger problem, that Frank found himself turning into a pickup addict. This, Frank knew, was not good. There was the legal danger, first off; and sooner or later you were bound to come down with something. Besides, most of the encounters weren't all that satisfying. So why did Frank keep feeling drawn to the hunt?

Not that there were that many places to hunt in. Larken occasionally made joking references to the "T-rooms," latrines where gay men sought each other out: but Frank found the idea utterly disgusting.

Then Todd suggested that Frank join a gym.

"I get enough exercise hefting furniture."

"No, man, no: for the guys. First you do the early-morning routine, okay? So when you run through everyone at that slot, you start showing up after work and there's this whole new crowd.
Yum!
Then you try the late-afternoon boys. Then the lunchtime cast, see?"

Frank grunted.

"You have the altogether
really
genetics for it, too, you know? You'd build out real sweet, man.
Real
sweet."

"You never use my name."

"Huh?"

"When you talk to me. You never call me Frank."

"What do I call you?"

"You don't."

"So, anyway, you won't have this chasing-around stuff hemming you in, bo. Because once you fill out and get a load of yourself in the magic glass, you aren't going to be so available. You'll think, I'm too good for just anyone. I'll wait till the
champs
show up. That's how it goes."

Frank was thinking how funny it was that while he had already tired of sex with Larken and couldn't seem to get enough of crazy Todd, once they had both come Frank and Larken would lie in bed talking for hours, whereas he and Todd had nothing to say except So long.

"Course," Todd went on, "you might prefer the real serious gym over on Santa Cruz and Romero." He was mixing up another of his repulsive banana-milk-wheat germ concoctions; Frank kept thinking about how relieved Todd seemed when he offered to make Frank one and Frank declined. Todd was a little stingy. Selfish. "What's your type, anyway?"

"My type?"

"Yeah. What kind of guys are you after?"

"I don't know.... A solid guy, right? A heavy rower. He knows what he wants out of life and... Something funny, Todd?"

Laughing as he washed some strawberries, Todd said, "That's not a description. What does he
look
like, man?"

"How do I know till I meet him?"

"Like Larken?"

Frank shrugged.

"You go for them slim and pretty?"

"Larken isn't pretty. He's... handsome."

"Same thing," said Todd, dicing the strawberries expertly.

"No, it isn't. Women are pretty. Men are handsome."

Todd took a look at Frank and set the blender spinning. "So what
do
you go for? Musclebod? Rough stuff? Big joint? Faraway boy?"

"Whoa, there. Hold it off a bit." Frank was shaking his head, resisting this. All these labels for your appetites, this fully ordered and structured world that had existed all these years beneath his notice. It was as if a colony of Martians had settled here centuries ago, blithely passing for human but constantly retreating into their own company to speak Martian and throw Martian-style parties and have Martian sex. Men from Mars. Now he was one of them, yet they baffled him. They gave him what he couldn't use and lured him with what ultimately wasn't worth the having. If only Larken had Todd's hungers; if only Frank could find someone smart and fun who was also wild in bed. Was there such a person?

"One thing I want to hear," said Elaine, "is when you realized that you were a lesbian."

"That word."

"What word instead, I wonder?"

"I always use 'on the Other Side,'" said Lois. "Or 'dyke.'"

"Can't we call it what it is?"

"'Lesbian.' It's like something you'd hear in a hospital."

"Anyway, when did you know?"

"Always, I guess." Lois shrugged. "It's built into you, isn't it?"

"You don't think it could be directed by something? Introduced?"

"By what?"

Elaine was thoughtful. "Because I... I don't think I knew what my feelings were till quite some years along. Or maybe I didn't have the feelings till then."

"Wasn't there some girl in high school that you—"

"A number of them, in fact. But I never thought I wanted them. I thought I admired them. Because they were so sharp and cute and popular. I wanted to be like them, accepted by them. I never thought I'd be nibbling on their breasts or..."

"Never?"

"Did
you?"

"All the time."

The two were lying in bed in the afternoon, talking in the dark, holding each other, occasionally brushing limb with limb or altering their positions.

"Tell me more about 'directed,' chick," Lois urged. "Let me in on that one.

"It's just a theory." "Like if a man rapes you, that would direct you to women?"

"No. It would happen younger. And I don't believe it's a specific occurrence that does it. It's psychological...."

"Like what? Crazy parents?"

"Maybe."

Lois snorted. "Who doesn't have crazy parents?"

"You never talk about yours."

"I don't like parents," said Lois. "I like kids."

"It's picturesque imagining you liking anything."

Lois laughed.

"I quit the lawyer today," Elaine suddenly said. "No notice. I just left."

"Without telling me?"

"I don't need your permission."

After a bit, Lois said, "True enough. But it affects me."

"More than you know."

"What does
that—"

"I'm writing a story about it. I can explain it better that way."

"Fancy stuff," said Lois. But Elaine could tell that she was pleased.

Frank joined Todd's gym, and the bigger Frank got the more time he put into it. After three months he was getting grand; after six months, he was opera. It was funny how the gym sneaks into your life as a hobby and suddenly becomes a marriage. It's inviolable and always there, part of the rhythm of your week, which now ran something like: Larken, gym, hauling; Larken, gym, hauling; Larken, cheating with Todd, hauling; and so on.

Or is it
cheating
?, Frank wondered. Lark and I are good friends, not... Look, we passed the first anniversary of my moving in with him and neither of us noticed till weeks later. And then we just had a laugh over it.

What Frank found
really
interesting was how everyone in Frank's world reacted to the new gymmed-up Frank. Larken tried to understand and respect it. That was Larken: thoughtful and loyal. Todd just kept egging Frank on and calling him "Stud." Frank's father, nursing his grudges and drinking like a man in a desert, accepted Frank's apology for their fight without even a handshake and turned away from Frank. He never noticed a thing.

No one else had much to say, but then Frank hardly knew anyone else. When he was in high school, his friends were students. When he was on the force, his friends were cops. Now that he no longer belonged to an institution, he had a very small circle of acquaintances.

Unless you counted the guys at the gym, the
types.
First, the serious bodybuilders, eyes on ice and as routined as clockwork. Then the sociables, who gab up and down the weight room from the bench press to the sit-up inclines, some never getting in more than a set of curls and a pushup. Then the flirts, who stalk their favorites, asking for training tips and admiring their "serious" arms. Finally the clunks, who wear the waistband of their shorts too high and who get on everybody's nerves by changing the weights on a bar while someone's between sets.

When Frank told Larken about all this, Larken annoyed him by saying that the very notion of a clunk was very gay thinking.

"You're coming over to the Other Side for sure, Frank," Larken warned him, enjoying the irony. "Categorizing guys by their style is what we do. Once you buy the idea that some people are exciting and some people are drab, you're a homo."

"I thought you didn't like that word."

"I can use it," Larken blandly rejoined. "You can't."

"I sold that story," Elaine told Lois.

"Hey?"

"The one I was writing. I went to this place where they run each page through a big wet machine that makes extra copies and—"

"For money? Like the
Reader's Digest?"

" The New York Review."

"What's that? Some famous magazine?"

"I don't know what it is. But they sent me a check for twenty-five dollars."

"That's great, chick. That's
lavish."

"Lois! Imagine you thinking something was lavish."

"When do I read it?"

Elaine handed over her carbons. Lois nodded but didn't move. "Here and now?"

"When else? We're home, it's quiet, we'll contemplate the characters and the themes. We'll ask, What is this about?"

"What'll you do while I read?"

"Listen."

"I have to read it
aloud?"
"How else can we share it? To hear you discovering me!: It will be a new form of making love."

"Sure, now I'm an actress," said Lois, stroking the papers, stalling, bemused. "What's it about?"

"An amorous lawyer."

Lois looked at Elaine.

"Or maybe not amorous. There was no love in him. Oh, an
appetitive
lawyer. Yes!"

Lois peered hard at the first page and began: "'Lawyers are crafty, and this lawyer—fat, ordinary, and satisfied—made the fox look like Br'er Bear.'"

Lois stopped. She asked, "What's the title of this story?"

"That's not the question you mean to ask."

"You're right. Whose story is this?"

"All fiction is true."