I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (18 page)

With so many presentations, fathers had to supervise the packing of the gifts in the big cardboard boxes each car had arrived with; the mean fathers dispossessed you of each item almost immediately, while the neat ones (like mine) let you stockpile your haul in the manner of Fafner. Finally, we would be summoned to the kitchen for ice-cream cones, the youngest of us already changed into pajamas. Then, family by family, the clan would disperse. We Pennsylvanians spent much of the night on the road, from Norwalk down through the Bronx to the George Washington Bridge, all the way through New Jersey, and home to Heavensville, my brother Jim and I up front and the oldest and the two youngest in the back with Mother. We had assigned seats for long trips, so she would know whom she was hitting even in the dark. One of my earliest and most pointless memories is of waking up, dimly and momentarily, whenever we stopped for a toll.

*   *   *

I grew up thinking that everyone had the same Christmas; happy families are alike. Coming to New York after college, I learned to my horror that some families simply traded a minor gift or two after dinner. My Jewish friends confirmed the wondrous rumor that Chanukah is like Christmas but
lasts eight days!
Yet they seemed rather blasé about it, and couldn’t match Christians for generational pageant. One companion, shockingly calm, told me his parents were Communists and didn’t celebrate anything. Worst of all were those who could claim a true holiday but wouldn’t join their families. To me, this was like practicing to be an orphan. The sole advantage in having relatives is to be able to go to a Christmas.

Not long ago, my parents moved to California, where my younger brothers live. Then Uncle Mike died, and Aunt Agnes decided to retire from party-giving. Suddenly I was an orphan like many of my set, placeless on Christmas. As they did, I shrugged when asked what I was doing for the holidays. Inwardly, I worried. What could I do? Sit in my armchair scheming and sulking, I suppose; but I do that all the time. The meanest bit of the deal was that I had agreed to mind the Pazuzu-like Bauhaus while Little Kiwi and Dennis Savage were away.

I dropped in as they were packing for their respective trips, Little Kiwi to his folks in Cleveland and Dennis Savage to his sister’s in Buffalo.

“Don’t forget to give Bauhaus something super for Christmas,” Little Kiwi told me.

“He’ll be lucky if I fill his water dish.”

“If you really wanted to,” said Dennis Savage, “you could get a nice party together. Carlo, Lionel, Alex. Don’t jive at us just because we’ve got homes to go to.”

“After the Christmases I’ve known, I’m not going to hunker down with a bunch of overgrown waifs pretending to feel loved.”

“Christmas,” he says, “is not about love. Christmas is about being with people who are so used to you they take everything you do for granted.”

“
You
could have that at the Ramrod.”

“Oh? And where could you have that, may I ask?”

Nowhere. My Christmas had vanished: moved away, passed on, grown old. Had it even been available, it could only play as a nostalgic forgery, for touch football and toys have lost their magic now that I am the only cousin of age without a spouse and children. Even my juniors have coupled and are staging their own Christmases, in Scarsdale, Chicago, Des Moines. A bachelor doesn’t quite fit into the Christmas I was raised on. Christmas is about families.

And so, as Dennis Savage and Little Kiwi bustled about, I began to tell them of my Christmas. As I spoke I realized that, yes, everyone does take everyone else for granted: as part of his heritage and destiny. Christmas is the one time of the year when you look about and
feel
your blood. Your race passes before you, epic in little—for instance when my tiniest cousins run up to dance when I play the piano as the grownups dote and clap, or in the spaces left by those departed, very much sensed and even mentioned, almost alive. And there is film on this. I have seen myself at the age of two-and-a-half, from the back, walking up Agnes’ tiled pathway in my camel’s hair coat, my cousin Donald throwing a welcoming football at my father, my mother sharing a fast confidence with Laura. The camera turns to our car as my father demonstrates the convertible top, hot stuff in those days. Suddenly I turn around for the first time and lo, I’m wearing a Flub-a-Dub mask. Who was holding that camera, Federico Fellini?

“You know,” said Dennis Savage, as I subsided, “sometimes your family sounds like
The Forsyte Saga
and sometimes it sounds like
Tobacco Road.
”

“Well, your family sounds like
Attack of the Killer Macadamia Nuts.
”

“Will you two stop?” cried Little Kiwi, pulling closed the zipper of his valise. “I know you’re only fighting because you’re both cut off from your brothers.”

“Oh yeah?” I countered. “And what do you fight with?”

“I don’t fight at Christmas.”

“Anyway,” said Dennis Savage, “we’re packed.”

I saw them downstairs to Third Avenue to get a cab, holding Bauhaus on his leash with one hand and a bag of his foodstuffs with the other.

“How cute of you,” I noted, “to book simultaneous reservations on different planes.”

“It’s not cute,” said Dennis Savage. “It’s expert planning—which, I might add, would have saved you from the terrible curse of Lonely Christmas.”

“We’re going to have lunch at the airport!” Little Kiwi crowed.

“Hey,” I said, “it’s snowing.”

“A white Christmas!” Little Kiwi breathed.

“Go home,” I suggested, between my teeth.

“Don’t be sad,” said Dennis Savage. “I’ll be back in two days.”

As they rolled away, Bauhaus looked after them, looked up at me, and began to growl.

“Don’t you start in, Buster,” I told him.

*   *   *

It was Christmas Eve. Living in midtown, I observe New York’s rhapsody of population more than many do, and I saw the crowds, as Robinson Crusoe saw the sea, when I stepped outside for a walk at nightfall. Shoppers, walkers, workers, cranks—the drawbacks of a Christmas lived on the blade. In the Village, Christmas is a rumor, in Brooklyn something done in dark alleys, in the suburbs an arcane rite shut away behind closed doors. But at Fifty-third and Third it’s Manhattan at its most dense and fierce. I saw a dumpy little man loaded with wrapped boxes take a cab from a smartly dressed woman who socked him; and when he got into the cab without responding, she spat at him through the open window. A few feet away, two construction workers were trying to help an old man who had fallen, but he was afraid to rise. Behind me, a man in a suit was chasing a hustler, and the boy dashed past us as the man called out, “You’ll come back sometime!” He seemed jolly. As I turned away a photographer in leather pants and a knitted cap snapped my picture and ran off. Too bad I wasn’t wearing my Flub-a-Dub mask.

It was very cold. I felt like turning back, but I wasn’t going to let Christmas spoil
my
holiday. I tried to whirl through the streets, but the crowds held me back, and the noise of the town, too, was heavy, from street musicians to the carol of shattering glass. The last straw was the eruption of Guy Webster out of Brooks Brothers, a dead-on meet, no escape. He wrung my hand and said that, as I was the smartest man in the world, I could save his life by helping him out of a terrible scrape, and, as I was his best friend in the world, I had to. I was thinking that the only thing worse than meeting Guy Webster was meeting Guy Webster’s inevitable comrade, Claudia Luxemburg, when Guy added, “And Claudia’s here, too!”

Now Guy, I must tell you, is the richest man I know. It’s family money, of course: the people I consort with make salaries, not fortunes. Guy and I were in the same class in Friends Academy, and, though we were not chums, we kept bumping into each other later in New York and struck up a sort of acquaintance. I think Guy was fascinated by my independence, for he was very much subject to parental guidance. I know I was fascinated by his
bon ton
set, for at the time I entertained thoughts of becoming a society satirist and hoped to collect material. I gave up early on, after divining that the rich have no emotions. They have manners, they don’t litter, and they’re apt pretenders at all kinds of skills from boating to sympathizing. A few of them even have style—irony, anyway. But they cannot truly be said to be people, because there just isn’t anything they want. However, I could not shake Guy, even when his lofty imperturbility began to get on my nerves and I became crabby with him. In some strangely endearing way he looked up to me—for advice, it seemed, but more exactly for gay glamour, for Guy was semi-closeted and knew neither clones nor queens.

What Guy knew was Claudia. Now, Claudia was what we in the trade call a
fag hag.
This is an almost unusably diffuse term, like “salesman” or “Spaniard” denoting a wide range of characters. Straights seem to think that fag hags are lesbians. No, never. Lesbians are lesbians. Fag hags are straight women who pal around with gay men. No one knows why. Some of them may fear the sexual competition of other women, or the sexual aggression of straight men. Some of them share the gay’s whimsically bizarre sense of humor and love of savage elegance and have deserted the straight world as boring. Some of them fall into gay company professionally, through connections in show biz or fashion. Some of them aren’t properly of the genre at all, only seem so momentarily—like Helen, my Fire Island hostess, who is something of a genre herself. No two hags are alike, but the bitter term itself suggests the gay’s ambivalence—and let’s admit that the classic pre-Stonewall hag tended to be a rather unappealing sort, as disgusted by gays as intrigued by them. They hugged the more unappealing men, who would say—after the hag had gotten drunk and offended everyone in the room—“Isn’t she
heaven?
”

Guy never said this of Claudia. Guy never said anything that couldn’t be uttered resonantly at high noon in the bar of the Piping Rock Club. Claudia never said anything that could; she spoke but one language, High-Middle Cabaret. She was pretty and vivacious, and, in spasms, great fun. But anyone who can spend three hours in a piano bar and meet a request to leave with the statement that “We’ve just gotten started!” is not my idea of a companion. To top it off, Claudia was unreliable. She had no awareness of time or responsibility, and that drives me wild. Some people show up three hours late for dinner; Claudia would show up a year and three hours late. I can forgive almost nothing, but recklessness especially infuriates me. Yet reckless people somehow gravitate toward me, as if seeking the reproaches their parents spared. Sometimes I feel like every spoiled kid’s surrogate father. “Lower your voice,” I order Christopher in a bookstore, when he loudly eructates publishing innuendo. “People are starving in China!” I snarl at Little Kiwi, when he throws out leftover food. (He just says, “Oh.” When I was young, we told my mother, “So send it to China.”)

Claudia’s tactless sense of obligation never offended Guy, because the rich don’t have much sense of it themselves. There’s nowhere that they have to be, ever, nothing that can’t be delayed. And Claudia was useful. She gave Guy a feeling for gay without his having to be there in person, and she could show up on his arm when he needed a date. Claudia was what is known as Guy’s beard.

“The writer!” Claudia cried, as husbands and wives poured out of Brooks Brothers, their gift lists fulfilled and the hearth beckoning. “Will he help us?”

“Of course he will. He has nothing else to do. Right, Bud?”

“It just so happens,” I intoned, “that—”

“Guy,” Claudia said, “I’d
kill
for a wee drinkie.”

“It just so happens,” said Guy, “that anyone alone on the street at this hour is a homeless Christmas bachelor. Now be good and come along and we’ll tell you about it.”

“Come along where?”

“What’s near?” He thought. “The Varsity House.”

“They don’t have menus,” Claudia enthused, as we walked. “You ask for whatever you want and they bring it.”

I want my family back, I was thinking; but at least I was in on an adventure. The Varsity House, two blocks northeast of Brooks Brothers—the rich walk, but not far—is one of those places you know, rather than read about. It is nondescript, low-key, virtually hidden behind an unmarked door, and gives the impression that, if your parents didn’t come here when they were dating adolescents, your business isn’t welcome. The staff greeted Guy by name, and I was relieved to see that I wasn’t the only man in a sweater: which reminds us that the rich don’t dress up as often as you’d think. Claudia asked for a Scotch with lots of ice and a shrimp cocktail, Guy for scrambled eggs and canteloupe, and I ordered French toast, one of the things a place like this does really well. The rich eat anything they feel like at any time of day, even Cream of Wheat for dinner, if they so choose. Then you ask for seconds on dessert and they look as if they had caught you cadging your dinner out of a garbage can.

Saving Guy’s life, it turned out, was simple: I had only to accompany him and Claudia to his parents’ traditional Christmas Eve bash.

“Why?”

“Old man,” said Guy, “you know how parents are. They
will
ask such-and-such, you know, and I keep fending them off. But now that I’m past thirty … well, all this evasion begins to seem ever so slightly tutti-frutti, doesn’t it?”

“Why don’t you just tell them that such-and-such in men past thirty means that they’re.…” Guy died in a look, though I was speaking very quietly. “Why don’t you tell them that ‘bachelor’ is a euphemism?”

“My dear fellow alumnus, they’d raving
shoot
me.”

“I remember your parents. They seemed rather sweet.”

“Well, they are sweet. They just think these incredibly grave thoughts about renouncing and disinheriting. My boy, it’s like an opera. Anyway, my back is against the wall at last, so I told them I’d bring my sweetheart along tonight. I
told
them. ‘My sweetheart.’ The exact words.”

“Guess who got the part?” said Claudia, simulating a resumé photograph.