Like People in History (44 page)

"On nights like this, I wouldn't trade the Pines for Saint-Tropez," I said, trying to be ironic, tacky, and sincere all at once.

"It's all rather Glam," Alistair agreed. His face, newly highlighted by the illumination, seemed, I found myself thinking, even worse than I'd thought when he'd come in the door of our house earlier that evening with Matt. Not so much older (although that was certainly true) as more set: a pinched, an almost disappointed, attitude.

And his clothing! Alistair hadn't been a fashion plate since adolescence, but with his height and shoulders and perfect size forty, he'd always managed to look casual, even elegant. The polo shirt he now wore was an oddly orange shade of pink with something remarkably like a Peter Pan collar from the late fifties. French or... His slacks, too, were foreign-made, cut too flat and too wide, stranding his narrow hips in excess cloth, while the legs were almost pedal-pusher tight. Docksiders were docksiders, even these slate-blue ones with cream trim, but the matching belt made them appear to be a Statement—a mistaken one. And that windbreaker! Composed of material resembling solidified napalm, it had been cut on biases not seen since Iceland in the twelfth century. I was dying to ask Alistair what circumstances had caused him to be forced to leave his own clothing behind in a hurry and borrow all this gear from some deckhand, but I was afraid he'd tell me that wasn't the case at all: that, instead, all this had been "chosen."

Oblivious to my silent devastation of his outfit, Alistair now squashed a Sobranie filter-tip into the Creole Rice he hadn't touched on his plate, and poured himself the last of the Saint-Emilion '74. "That handsome fellow behind the bar?" He motioned with the tip
of his glass.

"Mar-tan. Swiss. Enormous cock. Only likes slender twenty-year-old boys," I reported.

"Cuz is invaluable," Alistair said, regarding Matt with a steady eye—Matt, who was peering inside the restaurant all the while. "I was saying how invaluable my cousin was. He knows everyone here and everything about them. Hel-lo?" he trilled.

"Sorry." Matt came to. "I wanted to see if Thad was free yet."

"Thad's the tall, handsome, thin blond," I explained. "Our maître d'."

"The one who pinched your right nipple as we arrived?" Alistair asked.

"The same."

"He lost his lover a few weeks ago," Matt went on. "He said he was depressed and needed to talk."

"You a close friend?"

"Well... You know how it is when you need someone to talk to."

"Why, Matthew! You're a regular altruist!" Alistair said.

"It's now or never!" Matt stood up, excused himself, and went inside.

"You remember that big model, Jed Billingsly? With that great head of corn-silk hair?" I asked Alistair. "He was Thad's lover. Freaked out on angel dust and jumped out a thirteen-story window."

I'd meant to shock Alistair. I succeeded.

"You meant he...
lost
his lover," Alistair said, as he tried milking the

near-empty wine bottle. "Not merely misplaced him somewhere... but really lost... Not that hooch is any better. Except, of course, with liquor, by the time the real paranoia kicks in, one is far too gone to be able to wreak much violence upon oneself."

"Spoken like someone who knows," I half probed.

"Spoken like someone who's seen it enough," Alistair corrected. "Most recently on Ibiza. Lovely older man. Charming. One of those
echt-
European types. Bastard son of some famous duke or other from the Austrian Empire. Was left a pish of loot. But even so, he'd gone through it. Connected? My dear, he could compare three coronations he'd attended from frontish rows! Useless, of course, except to drink and talk. Utterly useless!"

"Don't think we don't have them here too," I said. "If you stick around long enough, you'll see one in particular. About fifty by now, still in great shape. You can see through the ravages how stellar he must have been. Wears shorts to show off those legs. Smokes a small pipe. Totally blitzed! Day, noon, or night."

"He was in Mykonos in April. Hasn't been seen unstoned in a decade." Alistair evidently knew the man. "One of the great gay courtesans of the century. The king of Belgium settled on him. Baudouin, was it?"

I nodded. Silence descended. Alistair sipped. I smoked. The rain dripped.

After a while, I was feeling uncomfortable enough to say, "You know, Stairs, for all the drugs I've taken, I've never gotten into angel dust. Some people swear by it. This guy—"

"Matt's looking good." Alistair changed the subject without, I was certain, being totally aware of what he was doing. "Well, better than good, really. He's... One forgets," he began and seemed to rethink what it was he had to say. "... One forgets over there how absolutely beautiful American men are! Of course there too one will chance upon something breathtaking—a young Alain Delon look-alike about to commit a felony, or an Alpine Adonis fit to burst his lederhosen. But here! Here they're everywhere you turn! We'd not been docked more than a few hours, and already I'd seen one more splendid than the other. Tea Dance was..." Words escaped him, "And you, Cuz, you're looking especially...," he searched for the word and settled upon: "fit! As though all this agrees with you."

I wished I could say the same about him. But my silence spoke enough.

"I, of course," Alistair pretended to pull out a compact, open it, check his image in the mirror, and then flinch, "I look like month-old
merde.
But what can one expect after a week at sea?"

He proceeded to tell in some detail about the trip across the Bermuda Triangle from the Turks and Caicos in a sixty-foot yacht. Evidently they'd encountered all sorts of weather—not to mention various odd people—upon the bounding main. Alistair ticked them off: "The Bahamian Coast Guard. One great strapping black, fellow kept stroking himself with a hawser just like in those old American Guild photos I used to keep under my bed in a shoe box. I could have come right there! Then there was a pirate boat with a mixed and not very attractive crew. Evidently we were too small for them to bother with. Then those Nicaraguan spongers who'd somehow gone adrift. Poor dears, we set them straight... well, only after being very queer to them. Then that trio of big-bellied blond Aussie sport fishermen out searching for bluefin but willing enough to, and I quote, 'sod around a bit with a boat full of poufs!' which was to say Tom and Juerg and myself." Alistair chuckled and turned to search through the fogged-up restaurant windows for Matt. "He'll be all right?"

"Matt? Sure!" I asked, "A walk?"

I got up, caught our waiter's eye, and mimicked signing the check. Paolo pointed at Matt and Thad at the bar. One or the other of them had taken care of it.

Not knowing how tanked he might be, but knowing quite well how treacherous wet decking could be, I held Alistair's arm going down the steps of the deck and aimed us toward the inner curve of the little Pines harbor. Up several wide steps and behind glass walls, the half dozen office- and storefronts we passed glowed a dim orange, as though preserved in amber.

Alistair kept on talking about the trip. He'd still not told me what he was doing in the Caicos with Tom and Juerg—middle-aged lovers and owners of the yacht now parked in the last "guest slip" at the tip of the harbor. This evening, while he'd been with us, they'd dined at a friend's house on Holly Walk: someone older and European whom I didn't know.

We passed the Sandpiper, rainwater pouring out of spouts from the upper deck. Peering into the thrown-open windows, I could see dinner was officially over; the staff was removing chairs and tables from the low-ceilinged central area that would become in a few hours a busy, exciting dance floor.

I thought, well, Alistair may be badly dressed and he may look like shit and he's definitely been drinking too much, but at least he's not a pod-person, as I'd been convinced he was about to become when I'd left San Francisco. Instead, he was almost his old self again: funny and cynical and uninhibited in that peculiar way of his. But where was Doriot?

At the ferry landing dock, where the Pines' only streetlamp splattered enough illumination to show every lath of decking soaked through with rain, the harbor mist had gathered together to bob upon the surrounding black water like meringue upon an incompletely gelled chocolate pudding pie. Already, above and beyond the shredding mist, we could make out the black curtain of night, speckled with hints of constellations.

Alistair took off his windbreaker and spread it over the bench that had been built into the landing area. We sat. Behind us, pine trees dripped and dripped.

"That house?" Alistair began. "It's yours?"

"I wish! We rent. Matt and I and Luis and Patrick."

"But it's an official address, no? If I wanted something mailed, I could use your address here?"

"I guess. But they don't deliver the mail. You have to go pick it up at the little P.O. Why?"

"Do you mind if I have something sent to me in your name?"

"Mail delivery's sporadic. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Why?"

"That's okay. I plan to stay here a short while. With Tom and Juerg."

Since he wasn't about to tell me why, I said, "Sure, send it in care of me, 420 Sky Walk."

"Sky!" Alistair mused. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. "But you don't call it that?"

"We call it Withering Heights. The name sort of developed among the Ozone Beach Club last summer. It's supposed to be clever."

I found I had to explain that the Ozone Beach Club wasn't anything formal but merely our pals from the area—along the walks from Tarpon to Shell—who entered the beach at and generally remained near Ozone Walk and who sometimes played at the volleyball net someone had set up there.

"You make it all sound like a boys' camp," Alistair said.

"One with drug overdoses and fist-fucking."

"Well then, a very
naughty
boys' camp!" Alistair laughed. "The only interesting kind, really. The address," he explained without missing a beat or changing his tone of voice, "is so I can receive the final divorce papers."

I was about to say "Excuse me?" and ask him to repeat himself, but I found that I'd very well heard what he'd said.

"I am sorry, Stairs."

"Not as sorry as I am."

None of it was completely unexpected. Yet it was. I had a moment of horror, wondering if he was about to break down on me, here, in the most public twenty square feet of the Pines.

Behind us, the trees dripped loudly. Before us, the mist was being slowly sucked backward out of the harbor. The orange lights on the second floor of the Botel were clarifying, as though cleaning people the size of Tinker Bell were wiping the lenses of my eyeballs.

I knew their marriage had not been an easy one. They'd honeymooned endlessly in Europe and returned to the Bay Area just as I was spending more and more time out of San Francisco. They'd opened their art gallery on Sutter Street there, and I'd attended the first few openings. By then I'd moved back to the East Coast, and I saw them on their frequent trips: they stayed at the Sherry and hit all of the choicest clubs night after night— Régine's, Le Jardin, you name it! Then they were gone back to Frisco to the gallery, I heard that they'd stuck with it for a year; then ditched it and moved to Europe, traveling from here to there, living in places— Saint-Malo, Rimini, the Balearics—I didn't know and couldn't afford, associating with people far too rich for my blood. I'd assumed that whatever problems I'd envisioned in Alistair and Doriot's relationship were subsumed under scads of money and the distractions of European high life.

Not quite. A few years passed, then Alistair suddenly resurfaced in America. He and Doriot were on a trial separation, which he was treating like an extended solo vacation and fuckfest. He'd come to spend a few days with Matt and me at the funky little house we rented in Truro on the Cape. We'd seen little of Alistair after that first afternoon, and even then he'd been intent on having sex with every halfway decent male who cruised him back. He'd returned to France, to Doriot, and, I'd assumed, to a continuation of their married life.

Now I remembered a late-night phone conversation I'd had not eight months ago with Doriot. We'd not spoken or met in several years, and I'd been astonished that it was she on the other end, calling from the chateau they'd been living in somewhere outside of Paris.

"You know Alistair better than anyone," she'd begun, sounding tight-voiced and thus barely in control. "You've got to tell me what I must do to... keep him...
human
here with me. He's become... a monster."

If she hadn't sounded so desperate, I might have bullshitted her. But I knew Alistair well, and I recalled how he'd swept Anatole Lamarr off that Cape Cod roof deck before the lobsters were ready to eat, and how they'd reappeared later from some spare room in the tall house, looking flushed but by no means sated, and how Alistair had driven off to P-Town with Anatole for the rest of his stay on the Cape.

"Send him to Paris for the weekend. Send him to the baths."

Her answer was slow in coming. "Aren't... I enough?"

"Wrong thinking. It has nothing to do with you. Do what I say and let him get it out of his system. He'll be okay for months!"

"I can't do that," she said and changed the topic immediately, talking about inconsequential matters. Before I hung up, I'd said again, "Send him to Paris for the weekend."

She hadn't. Hadn't been able to bring herself to. And now they were divorcing. I wondered if there had been some lurid discovery: Alistair and the groundskeeper, say—he had always gone in for the staff.

"Doriot was everything I'd ever wanted," Alistair said now in a tragic voice. "Ever since I was a little boy."

I recalled him in our suburban Long Island living room late at night watching old black-and-white movies, surreptitiously smoking a cigarette. I remembered his declaration about how he wanted to live in a Manhattan penthouse and be with clever and sophisticated grown-ups. He'd achieved that wish early on. Evidently he harbored other, even more ambitious, dreams I'd not heard of.