Like People in History (53 page)

"Every time you say something bitchy, Luis, Miss God makes those lines around your mouth deeper.... I thought I'd pay a visit on my dear cousin. Isn't it down the walk and on the other side of Fire Island Boulevard?"

"Yes, but we heard...," Patrick began. Then he mimed buttoning his lip.

"Heard what?" I asked.

"Nothing!" Luis said for the both of them.

I shrugged. "It's summer. The Pines! Even the shirt's
de trop!"

Halfway down Sky Walk, I realized that I was surrounded by monarch butterflies, some the size of my hand. One perched on the cream side panel of my Speedo, a very lifelike brooch, and would not be shaken or shooed off.

The number they'd given me was one house left from the Bay, beyond a fence too high to see through. The front door lay immediately beyond the open gate and was also unlocked.

As I stepped in, the house seemed empty. The red floor tiles were large and cool against my bare feet. The furnishings in the living and dining room looked one stage more costly and thought-out than what I'd call Pines-Beach-House-Rental-Generic: lots of white rattan furniture but with better-than-average upholstery and coverings; the expected woven sisal rugs, but these were thick and looked handmade. The giant stands of indoor elephant-ear plants appeared healthy, stuffed in hip-high hand-thrown ceramic pots. All of it was lighted by narrow, ceiling-high windows.

In that second, and for no reason I could fathom, lines of poetry flew into my mind: "Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-brow'd night/ Give me my Romeo: and..."

And... and what? I couldn't for the life of me remember the rest of it. Did we have Shakespeare at the house? Between
Hints from Heloise
and
Leatherman's Handbook
? Not likely. Some more literary queen in the Pines might.... La Kramer?... Maybe.

I became slowly aware that I was hearing a rhythmical sound, or rather several rhythmical sounds meshing. The sounds came from the left, where a wide doorway opened onto what looked to be a bedroom wing... all of the doors ajar.

My thinking went like this: people are fucking here. Since it's his rental, it must be Alistair and someone else. I'd better leave and come back another time. But what about Matt? Where's he?

Before I could take the next step and put two and two together, I realized I was hearing Alistair's laughter. Not from the left—ergo not from the bedroom—but from the right, which meant outside!

Relieved, I walked toward the wall of glass, opened the doors, and found myself in a good-sized yard. Unpainted pine decking dropped to a large sundeck, and beyond it, the pool, not Olympic-sized but big enough, and beyond that, under a canvas marquee, a semi-enclosed screened dining room, set up for lunch. Six of the eight deeply curved rattan chairs were occupied by Alistair, Matt, and four men I didn't know.

"No room! No room!" Alistair shouted loudly as he saw me. In his sudden effort to rise and greet me, he knocked over a glass on the table that had been holding a mimosa. Clearing himself from the table where some version of a Mad Tea Party did indeed seem to be in progress, Alistair swooped out of the screened veranda to meet me by the pool with much exaggerated near-kisses, the way women greet each other in middle period Fellini movies.

"Finally!" he exaggerated, sweeping an arm around my shoulder and half pushing me under the marquee.

Where I noticed most of them but Matt were older—mid and late forties—and all of them clad—very un-Pines-like—in shirts and slacks or shorts and even shoes.

"Come for a swim?" one gray-haired fellow with a good-sized, heavily pedigreed nose asked in a thick accent. "How nice of you, Alistair [Al-ees-stare!] to provide us with boys frolicking a la Esther Williams!"

I placed the speaker as a Pines resident, scion of a European noble family. Alistair pulled me to the table.

"This bit of business, gents, is my very own dear second cousin, the estimable Roger Sansarc. And although some of you may take his cuteness as pure, physically unadulterated fluff, he's an important magazine editor."

"We
are
impressed," a jolly, handsome, thick-bodied Asian man said. "Angling for interviews, are you?"

"Barry Wu," Alistair introduced us, "the
real
last dowager empress of China."

"Charmed!" I heard from closer up. The large serpentine hand that insinuated its way into my grip belonged to a equally slender, long person, virtually colorless in skin, eye hue, or distinguishing feature, wearing what appeared to be a complete safari outfit sans only the hat.

"Timothy Childs-Shillito," Alistair introduced him,
"not,
" he clarified, "of the Middlesex Shillitos!"—as though that made a big difference, or as though I'd even know what the difference signified.

"Heavens, no!" the named one declared.
"You
may call me Aunt Tim," he declared, "and you may park your substantially filled bathing costume directly—that's it!
—directly
athwart Aunt Tim's suddenly pulsing lap."

I smiled and demurred.

"You already met the Count of No-Account," Alistair said, adding the long French name in hushed tones. Then louder, "No matter how pushy he gets, we never tire of reminding him that he's not duke until his brother croaks!"

"Your name sounds awfully familiar," I told the Count candidly, looking to make trouble. "Old family?"

"So old, our family crowned Charlemagne," he replied huffily.

"Oh my! Was that a good idea?"

The others laughed. Even the Count cracked a smile. "Perhaps... on reflection... not!"

"And this fellow," Alistair pointed me to someone who looked much younger and handsomer than any of the others, and also somewhat familiar, "is Horace Brecker the Third... my ex-cousin-in-law! Brecker's in town from the Coast, shopping for real estate. He's obviously a fish out of water in this company. But he's pretending not to be—noblesse oblige!"

Now that I thought of it, Brecker did resemble Doriot: the same heavy, multishaded blond hair dropping straight off his head like a helmet, his cropped closer, the same startling, eaglelike, probing eyes (his green) that pulled into focus a face otherwise almost Norman Rockwellish, WASP American.

"And of course, the beauteous Matthew!" Aunt Tim said, his hand raised in a flourish. The others all looked Matt's way, giving tacit homage.

"We know each other," Matt said, quietly. He was looking, I thought, completely different today than I'd ever seen him, his thick dark hair uncharacteristically parted in the middle, curling to either side. He wore small octagonal green-paned glasses, which imparted a bookish air. His costume consisted of a loose, scooped-neck muslin shirt, delicate mustard-colored knee-length Bermudas, and well-worn moccasins; he might have been a Bengali day student.

So this was what Luis and Patrick had meant about how I was dressed!

"Do we detect some mut-u-al his-to-ry in the way that was said?"

Barry Wu asked, looking back and forth from Matt to me. "Dare we hope... scan-dal?"

"The very worst!" Alistair assured them. "Close your ears, Brecker," he warned, then explained to me, "Brecker's only here on spec. He isn't at all sure what he thinks about men who like other men."

"Do too! I think it's their own business," Brecker said forthrightly, in that flat, accentless tone of voice I'd come to associate with Bay Area natives of a certain class when I'd lived out there. "I've always thought so and said so!"

I was about to have to decide whether or not I was going to attack Brecker—who, after all, wasn't half bad-looking—as "bigot of the week," when he suddenly continued.

"I feel compelled to add," he said in a somewhat less certain tone of voice, "that until I arrived out here, I'd never been exposed to so many of these fellows, nearly jay naked all day long! In the bank, and the grocery store, on the beach naturally, but also cutting hedges, and delivering propane tanks and manning the fire truck, testing its gear as I saw earlier, or just ambling along the walkways, and well, really anywhere I might happen to be. And all of them in such healthy physical condition! Like Matt and our new arrival. Until now, I have to admit I'd never seen much point to this male-male business," Brecker finished off, red-faced, out of embarrassment at having spoken so long or at suddenly realizing what he'd ended up saying, it wasn't clear which.

I wondered who could possibly gloss that statement. Alistair?

No, it turned out: Barry Wu. "You do understand, don't you, Horace, that the 'fellows' here feel that since they 'have
it
,' they might as well 'flaunt
it!'
" Barry's last word dissolved into glissandos of giggles.

"There are two more guests," Alistair pointed to the empty chairs.

"I heard them," I explained, "as I was coming in."

"...We've forgotten who they are," he concluded.

A mimosa was poured for me, and a sweet and crumbly French confection put between my lips. I chewed, sipped, and observed.

Observed Alistair among his "old" friends—"Who knew
cher
Hervelois would be here?" he said to me of the Count, "or that Brecker would arrive?" Observed Alistair being comfortably, thoughtfully social again—"Stiletto here plays the total naïf, but you've never met a wickeder puss!" Observed, reminding myself that it had been more than a decade since the enormous curry-dinner-and-LSD galas at Alistair's Chelsea penthouse.

I also observed Matt, who accompanied his unexpected new costume with a new intellectual, offbeat persona—"Ah, but that's not what Chuang-tzu said," I heard erupt out of his mouth at one point.

To which Barry Wu made some complex, alternately sweet-tempered and irritated reply, before demanding and receiving a tangerine and a small knife.

"This is the only thing I recall of my childhood on the outskirts of the court of the Yellow Emperor," he announced to us, taking the fruit in one hand and applying the sharp tip of the knife to it so lightly and cutting so quickly I was certain he was going to end up with an elaborately bloodied palm. Finished, he dropped the knife and held up the hand with the fruit. Lightly gripping one tip of orange skin between two fingers, he pulled, and the sliced peel spun, flavoring the air, as a single unbroken length of inner skin. When he dropped it on a napkin nearby, it formed a perfect shell of tangerine. The fruit itself had been evenly divided: it fell open, shameless as a gardenia, ready to be eaten.

Applause, whistles, foot stamping.

"That," Barry concluded with more chimes of laughter, "in a nutshell—or should I say a mandarin peel?—is the result of five thousand years of culture!"

A ringing phone pulled Alistair indoors, where he insisted I attend him. It turned out to be a brief, hilarious, and to me completely enigmatic call. Afterward he dropped onto the sofa, weak with laughter, and gesturing around him, said, "It'll do, don'cha think?"

"It's fine."

"It's only a few more weeks. But I feel better with my own place."

"Only natural."

"Not that all of you weren't superb about me as a guest!"

"Brilliant and superb."

"Except for you, who are never there. Bad you," he added, playfully slapping me. "Leaving poor Matthew to his own devices. You're just lucky I happened along and rescued him from that ghastly, bloodsucking, dependency addict! What's his name?"

"Roger Something or other?"

"No, stupid! Thaddeus! About to sink her claws bone-deep...," Alistair said. "Imagine, all these years! You never told me what a prince he was," gesturing outside.

"You expected maybe chopped liver?" I asked. "Anyway, you're the one who picked him out. Remember? The day he came into Pozzuoli?"

"Yes, of course. But he was some hulking country bumpkin! You've taken him in hand. You've done things. Rounded the edges! Polished the surfaces!"

"You make me sound like some Vegbian potter."

"What kind of potter?" Alistair asked. He looked wonderful, I thought. Hadn't looked this good in years. Relaxed. Happy.

"Vegbian! Vegetarian Lesbian! That's what we call the Lorraines and Elaines who move to rural lanes with their lovers and who eschew males and machinery and who don't shave their underarms and who wear enormous overalls and get very fat and very strong and who raise other people's children and lots of animals using only breast-feeding and who only eat vegetables and who suffer in silence when some male has an orgasm sixty miles away."

Alistair looked at me in wonder. "You were never so smart! How did you get so fucking clever?"

"Oh, please!" I groaned—partly because most of the company had come into the house and overheard not only Alistair's last words but also part of my description, which I'd unashamedly spun out for them.

"No, really!" he insisted. "You were the densest... He was!" he said for them all, now settling around us. "The very
dullest
of boys! He played in dirt! He pitched softballs! And he had this golden retriever of a boyfriend who adored the very earth he trod on."

"Who?" I demanded to know. Then: "You remember August?"

"Ghas-tly child, I always thought," Alistair admitted. "Which is hardly the point. What
is
the point is that even back then you had one lad or another trained to kiss your pink little behind."

"Don't believe a word he's saying!" I addressed the others, Matt especially. He'd come in last and now slouched at the open door.

"It's perfectly true," Alistair said. "They literally fought over his favors. I marveled. I envied. To no avail. They'd regularly come to fisticuffs over which one of them clear Caz would sit next to in the mud. For years I sought the secret."

"He could have cared less," I explained, remembering how coldblooded about my pals he'd really been.

"Matthew would know the secret!" the Count said, confirming that his nose wasn't so far in the air as to not have noticed that we went together.

"He would?" Brecker asked. "Oh, hell! You're not going to, like, suddenly reveal that you guys've been secretly... are you?"

"It's hardly a secret," Barry said.