In Memory of Angel Clare (30 page)

“Hi there.”

Jack’s voice startled her. She had not seen him come up behind her in the window. He stood beside her, looking as uncomfortable as he had when he arrived with Michael. She was the one he was embarrassed to be seen by tonight.

“Oh, just feeling thoughtful,” she told him, snorted and added, “and I’m only on my second drink.”

Behind them, everybody laughed at something Danny had said.

“See? It’s not so awful or creepy,” Jack whispered.

“No. But it’s strange,” she admitted. “I’m only on the outside looking in, but Michael worries me. You and Michael disturb me. I still think you’re playing with fire.”

Jack sighed, attempted a smile, and said, “I’m glad you’re on the outside looking in. Seriously. I need to know there’s somebody out there I can trust. Who can throw me a line if I need it. Because it is strange, isn’t it?”

She was pleased to hear him talk this way, relieved to be told her distance could be useful. “Maybe I’ve just turned into a little capitalist. But I don’t feel comfortable with sacrifice. Maybe it’s my feminist perspective. It’s funny, but I’d feel better if I thought you were
using
each other sexually. You’re telling the truth when you say there’s nothing physical between you?”

“There isn’t. Not yet.”

“You want there to be?”

“Sometimes, yes. But it’s not a high priority.”

She wondered if there ever could be, if Jack could hold Michael’s body without remembering how he lifted that body from the bathtub. Without having seen it, however, with only her own imagining of it to go by, the image sometimes felt intensely erotic to her.

“That’s good to hear,” she said. “That you can still consider it, I mean. Because I don’t want to think you’ve renounced everything for Michael.”

“No,” said Jack, “I don’t
want
to use him as my hair shirt,” as if still afraid he did just that. “It’s no picnic living with Michael. He loses his temper with me, but I’ve learned to lose my temper with him, nicely. It’s too small an apartment for two people, which is good, because he has to get out and do things. He’s going back to school, which I look forward to.” Jack laughed lightly. “Sometimes he’s like living with a bigger, more difficult version of Elisabeth Vogler, one who talks back. But beneath all the irritation, I don’t feel bad about it, Laurie. I don’t know why, but he’s made my life simpler, even easier. I don’t feel guilty anymore, which is a nice change.”

Laurie was relieved he still doubted he was doing the right thing. A Jack who could be righteous about anything besides books and movies was more than she could bear. But there was a peaceful note to him that was new, an undertow of quiet that might be fatigue or resignation or contentment, she wasn’t sure which.

Without noticing themselves doing it, they had gradually turned their backs to the window so they could steal looks at Michael while they spoke, reminding themselves to keep their voices low.

He seemed very calm, healthy, and unexceptional out there, sitting on the sofa in a starburst of elbows and knees, brushing crumbs off his sweater, then leaning forward to listen to Ben, who was holding forth on his hopes and fears for an AIDS activist group currently in the news. The others apparently felt comfortable enough to talk about AIDS-related things in Michael’s presence. Michael asked Ben where and when this group met.

“He
looks
okay,” said Laurie. “Is it real or is it an act?”

“Both,” Jack told her. “He’s still confused and he gets depressed. Sometimes. He’s ashamed of what he did. Sometimes. But he can live with it now. We live with it.”

“Fess up, Puppy!” Danny was poking Ben in the stomach. “The real reason you’re so hung up on ACT UP is because it’s full of cute boys who won’t give you the time of day. It’s in their bylaws!” Danny told everyone. “‘We will have no elected officials. We will be completely democratic. We will not sleep with Ben Slover.’”

And Michael laughed.

It was a loud, irrational, natural laugh, more for Danny’s delivery than the joke, a laugh that caught Michael by surprise. Only when he recovered from it did he ask himself why he had laughed, and why he should feel so happy to be here.

He took another swallow of wine, but his pleasure was more than wine. This light, this shiny blond floor, these people who kept forgetting and remembering his presence. All of it pleased him, but in a different way than it had in that other life when Clarence first brought him here.

He felt Jack and Laurie conspiring at the window and knew they talked about him, but Michael didn’t mind. He trusted Jack to defend him and Laurie to doubt gently. He didn’t even mind that Jack was no longer beside him and he had to face the others alone. He was pleased he could hold his own with them. He had come to this dinner tonight expecting it to be a challenge, a trial, and he was pleased he could meet it, surprised and pleased his feeling of shame could also be a source of strength.

When he arrived tonight, when he came through the door with Jack, Michael sensed each of the couples drawing a little closer together, not literally but with brief glances and subtle adjustments of posture—as if Michael were the Spirit of Loneliness, the End of Love, even the Angel of Death. He had not felt bad about that. It gave him a feeling of power, and having power, Michael could be comfortable. He was embarrassed by what gave him that power, but it was another person who had done that, someone capable of emotions so black and intense Michael found it hard to believe he had been that person. He liked to think he was separated from that person by the raised seams on his wrists. Whenever Michael was nervous or depressed, he absentmindedly stroked his wrists through his cuffs, following each scar to its end, reminding himself where he had been.

He would die. Everyone in this room would die. It was one thing to know that, and something else to feel it. Mortality made most of their failings seem minor, tender, and bearable.

Michael knew he would continue to feel shame, guilt, and irritation. He would continue to think guiltily he had become Jack’s burden, on days he didn’t irritably think Jack had become his. He would continue to humor Jack’s clumsy concern for his shifting states of mind, humor him out of shame, duty, respect, and affection. They would probably go to bed with each other, which would spoil what peace they had, forcing Michael to choose between the cruelty of refusing to be Jack’s lover and the cowardice of consenting. He would finish school and choose to do something with his life, which he would later regret.

And yet, Michael felt he could live with all that, just as he lived with Jack, just as he lived among the foolish, well-meaning men and women chattering around him, just as he lived with himself.

Immortal, he thought with a sudden grin that caused everyone to look at him, people would be unbearable.

Christopher Bram is the author of nine novels, including
Father of Frankenstein
, which was made into the Academy Award–winning movie
Gods and Monsters
, starring Ian McKellen. Bram grew up outside of Norfolk, Virginia, where he was a paperboy and an Eagle Scout. He graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1974 and moved to New York City in 1978. In addition to
Father of Frankenstein
, he has written numerous articles and essays. His most recent book,
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
, is a literary history. Bram was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001, and in 2003, he received Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lives in Greenwich Village and teaches at New York University.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Excerpt from “Little Gidding” in
Four Quartets,
copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Copyright © 1989 by Christopher Bram

Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

978-1-4804-2455-5

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