I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (4 page)

“Make him say the word,” said Alex.

“He cried before God and gays,” Dennis Savage noted. “Justice is served.” To me he added, “You were right—he wept.”

“I don’t know what anyone is talking about here,” said Joe. He kept wiping his eyes and crying. “Do you think I’m a beast?” he asked me.

“That little queen started it and you finished it. As far as I go, you did the right thing.”

We solemnly shook hands.

“Oh look!” Alex cried. “Look at the two
men!
”

“Now I think I
will
sock him!”

“No, Joe. Tell him to go fluff his puff.”

“His … puff?”

“Just say it.”

He gave me an odd look, but he said it: “Alex, go fluff your puff!”

Everyone was laughing. The fight was about courtship, not honor: a comedy.

“You call me horrible names and make fun of my morals,” Joe told Alex. “You say you’re glad that I cried. You call me a beast. And now we’re all laughing. It’s crazy! My face is wet with my own tears and I’m laughing!”

“Well, there you go, shweetheart,” I said in my Humphrey Bogart voice. “Welcome to gay.”

“That,” said Dennis Savage, “is the
worst
Greta Garbo imitation I have ever heard.”

The Mute Boy

Everyone has a smartest friend, a handsomest friend, a most famous friend, and a best friend. Mine are Lionel, Carlo, Eric, and Dennis Savage. Some of us have a sweetest friend, too; mine was Mac McNally. In a city where everyone you’re supposed to want to meet turns out to be a ghoul, Mac was a hobbit: whimsical, sentimental, and tactfully frisky. He adored his friends; he was faultless and true. I wondered where he had got it from till the day one of his brothers showed up from the family seat near Racine. Over dinner, I saw Mac in an older, larger version—the same quick grin, the same eager nod of agreement, the same unselfish strength. I have seen (and had) my fill of brothers, but this one seemed to belong to some new genre in relationships, one of pledges made early, freely, and permanently. There were no delicacies of regret or disapproval in his affection for Mac, no fascism in his beautiful morals. He was that unheard-of thing in families, the relative who treats you as a perfect lover. Their intimacy was fearsome, like a ballet without music. I had heard it was a big tribe. “Are they all like that?” I asked later. Mac grinned and nodded.

By day Mac was a computer programmer—by night too, sometimes, depending on the project—but his great gift was writing, in the tightest, leanest style I’ve ever known. So, too, was Mac tight and lean, very light, very swift. But his eyes weighed a thousand pounds. Letters were his forte. I met him in the mail, in a note congratulating me on some book or other, forwarded by the publisher. I answer the nice ones, and so found myself in correspondence with an address just up the avenue, reading arresting disquisitions on a host of subjects, all of them love, in penciled block letters. One letter arrived with photographs, of Mac and four friends on summer holiday in Portugal, of Mac and an older couple camping in Maine, of Mac and his three brothers and their wives and children at the Thanksgiving bash.

“What is he, a tour guide?” asked Dennis Savage, when I showed him the pictures.

“You don’t miss a chance to bring ants to the picnic, do you?”

“How come he’s never alone? He’s cute, anyway. When are you going to meet him?”

It comes down to that, doesn’t it? The quest. It was Mac who broached the question, asking me to dinner—but it was a friend of his, Rolf something, who did the phoning.

“Mac’s held up at work,” he explained, “and we didn’t know how late a day you keep.” It sounded dotty to me, but I went along with it. On the afternoon of the date, Rolf called again. “Are we still on for tonight?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Fine. Just checking. We don’t want Mac’s feelings hurt in the slightest way, do we?”

“Did you hear I was going to hurt them?”

“No offense. But some New Yorkers are unreliable and I didn’t want any misunderstanding.”

“Have no fears. When it comes to appointments I’m sure as steel.”

“That’s what Mac’s friends like to hear.”

Maybe he is a tour guide, I thought as I hung up. I haven’t had a call that strange since the last time I spoke to my mother.

*   *   *

Rolf opened the door. He was tall, handsome, and slightly gray, of the stalwart type that, I was to learn, marked Mac’s cohort. My handshake is pretty solid, but his was a grip of grips: I felt like a glass of water meeting the North Sea. As I came in, Rolf stood aside and there was Mac. He pointed at himself, pointed at me, touched his heart, and indicated the apartment with a sweep of his hand.

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” said Rolf, “and my apartment is yours.”

I looked at Rolf. Rolf looked dead on at Mac.

Mac and I shook hands and he picked up a glass, looking enquiringly at me. “What would you like to drink?” said Rolf.

I asked for wine.

Mac made a “fork in the road” with his index fingers, then upturned the palms in a questioning gesture.

“White or red?” said Rolf.

An incorrigible lush, I answered, “Whichever you have more of,” making my lip movements as clear as possible. I must have looked like someone in an early Hollywood talkie, overtly proclaiming the new miracle of dialogue. Smiling, Mac slashed the air with a finger, put it to my lips, jabbed himself with his thumb, and, slowly drawing his open hands up to his ears, nodded once. “Speak normally,” said Rolf, who was beginning to sound like a Conehead. “I can hear.”

Mac poured wine for us. We sat. “I have to tell you,” I began, “you write wonderful letters. I’m amazed at how many ideas you cram onto a single page.”

Mac shook his head vigorously, pointed at me, deftly suggested writing as he pulled the finger back to stab his heart, made a circle with thumb and forefinger as his eyes appeared to read, raised the circle high in the air, and read more. “No,” said Rolf, “your letters are the wonderful ones. They move me so I must reread them.”

“I got it,” I murmured, staring at Mac. Rolf was no longer the translation, but an echo. Mac’s sign language was as eloquent as his letters were: his hands gave the message, their speed or angle lent nuance, and his face showed how the message and nuances felt. All you had to do was look. By the time the food appeared, I myself was performing Mac’s “sounding”—his term, a correction of my faux pas, that delightful and exhausting night, in verbalizing the notion that I was “speaking” for him. Fiercely shaking his head, he reached for one of the little pads lying all about the apartment, and with mischievous grace wrote me in those block letters I knew from the mail: “I do speak—without noise.”

*   *   *

He was not deaf, only mute, apparently the reverse of the usual condition; even a fluke, for all I could guess, for I never asked. He was proud of his ability to cope with his impairment but, if not ashamed of it, reticent about it. His many friends protected him—crowded him in theatres, blocked and ran passes for him in bars, sat in on his dinners with new friends, sounded for him in banks and restaurants. His family constantly found reasons to come east and check up on him, bring him things, kiss him. I, who was to turn thirty before I dared embrace my father and have never done more than shake hands with my brothers, was dazzled. Still, I wondered how much protection one needs. Mac’s friends insistently set him up with Good Husband Material; their dinner parties looked like the waiting room at Yenta the Matchmaker’s. And Mac’s family had their version, prodding him to Come Home and Settle Down—meaning, translated from the straight, “Give up the rebellious gay phase and do what is done.”

But Mac loved the city. He loved crowds and dinners and doing eight things every evening. “Do you realize?” he had written in one of his earliest letters, “that there are probably a million gays in New York? Allowing for variables of looks, spirit, vocation, and bad habits, each of us may have a thousand ideal mates within immediate geography. We need but look.”

What can you project without a voice in this town of the insinuating opener and the whipcrack reply? You might show optimism, hesitation, disappointment, pain—and all too clearly. Speakers grow up learning to develop or hide their emotions; Mac had learned only to display his. Thus did he speak, as he claimed. Better, he charmed. And I mean strangers. Belligerent strangers. Even belligerent, tough strangers on a mean bad day.

I went walking with him one afternoon when he had just received news about an aunt who had cancer; like a puppy, Mac perked up when you walked him. I’m champion at distracting wounded comrades—when all else fails, I start a fight—but Mac was half in a daze, and blundered into fresh-laid concrete on Forty-ninth Street, east of Park. One of the masons, foully irate, came over to berate him. Before I could intervene with my usual exacerbating ruckus, Mac stopped me, indicating the laborer with the philosopher’s upheld index finger and himself with a down-turned thumb.

“He’s right and I’m wrong,” I sounded, dubiously, for Mac. He showed us the sidewalk, ran a hand over his eyes, and chided the hand with a look. “I should have been watching where I was going.”

As the laborer blankly surveyed this latest charade of the Manhattan streets, Mac tore off a message for him.

“‘I have had bad news,’” the man read out. “‘I’m sorry.’” He looked at Mac. “Family news, huh?”

Mac nodded.

“Yeah, well … yeah, sure.” He shifted his stance and patted Mac’s shoulder. “It’ll be all right. I’m sorry, too. For yelling.”

Mac hit his chest with a fist and shook his head. “No,” I sounded. “It was my fault.”

“No—”

Mac hit himself again.

“No.”
The man grabbed Mac by the shoulders. “No, you … look … I gotta get back to work.” He touched Mac’s nose and gave him a quarter. “Be a good boy, now.”

Mac smiled and nodded.

“Right,” I said, after we had walked on a bit. “I’ve been in New York for seven years and I’ve seen, I think, everything. But did that really happen?”

Mac shrugged benignly.

“He gave you a quarter!”

“People like me,” Mac wrote. “I’m nice.”

“What’s the secret of nice?” I wondered aloud.

“Forgiving,” he wrote.

He could have used somewhat more in height and weight, no doubt; it doesn’t do to be quite so boyish after twenty-six. Yet he made it work, for his short and thin suited the grin and the nod. He was the kind of man who could grow a moustache and no one would notice—would see it, even. He was the eternal kid, tirelessly seeking his mate. Fastidious, he wanted true love or nothing. But love is scarce even when forgiveness makes you nice, and I wondered what Mac did to fill in meanwhile, till one afternoon when Dennis Savage and I were hacking around in Mac’s apartment and Mac pulled out the world’s largest collection of porn magazines.

He did it, typically, to stop a war. Dennis Savage was cranky (as usual) and began to growl at me about something or other. Who knows, now, what? My taste in men? My dislike of travel? The Charge of the Light Brigade? Anyway:

“I’m going to get a huge dog,” says Dennis Savage. “And you know what I’ll train him to do?”

Mac touched us urgently, him then me. “Please don’t fight,” I sounded; adding, for myself, “Okay.”

“Bite up your ass,” Dennis Savage concluded.

“You don’t need a dog for that, from what I hear.”

He rose, fuming like Hardy when Laurel puts a fish in his pants, and Mac got between us, scribbling a cease-fire: “Sit down to play Fantasy.” Bemused, we held our peace as he hauled stacks of magazines out of a closet. “I usually play by myself,” he mimed to my sound, “but it works in groups, too.” He handed us each a number, prime porn. “Browse and choose,” he wrote. “Each gets anyone he wants for one night.”

“Get him,” said Dennis Savage.

Mac wrote a note just for him: “Pretend!”

“Where did all this porn come from?” I asked. “It’s like the Decadent Studies Room in the Library of Congress.”

Mac went through an elaborate mime. “I threw up on the bureau of my aunt?” suggested Dennis Savage.

Mac made a wry face as he picked up the pad. “It keeps me off the streets,” he wrote.

“Strange men give him quarters,” I added. “They touch his nose.”

“He forgives,” Dennis Savage noted, “and his kisses are as sweet as the bottom inch of a Dannon cup.” Innocence is Dennis Savage’s party.

Mac reverently showed us a spread entitled “The Boys of Soho.” Writing “This one’s my fave,” he pointed out a dark-haired chap of about twenty-five, standing nude, arms folded across his stomach. There was nothing splendid about his looks or proportions, but something arresting somewhere; his face, you thought; you searched it, found nothing, but kept looking. Amid a load of musclemen, hung boys, and surly toughs, here was a man of no special detail but an attitude of sleaze too personable to ignore. I imagine evil looks like this.

“‘Nick,’” I read out. “‘A typical Soho boy with an air of fun and a taste for the finer things.’ What does that mean, I wonder?”

“Hepatitus B on the first date,” Dennis Savage answered.

Mac mimed, and I sounded: “Do you think he would respond to a letter?”

“Mac, you wouldn’t fall in love with that! What would your family say?”

“Just for a night,” Mac mimed, then, by pad: “How would you contact such a person?”

“We wouldn’t know,” said Dennis Savage, “so forget it.”

“You could write him a letter in care of the photographer,” I put in. “Or even call the photographer and ask—”

“You bonehead!” Dennis Savage pointed out.

“Let the kid have some fun. Why should he go through life only imagining where such paths lead? Everyone alive who isn’t a coward or a creep deserves one glorious night.”

“Which are you? Coward or creep?”

“Glorious.”

He waved this nonsense away and concentrated on Mac. “I’m going to set you up with some very excellent Italian accountants in the West Seventies. They make the best husbands, believe me. Always remember The Three Advantages of the Italian beau: hairy chest, volcanic thighs, and the commitment of a Pope.”