Like People in History (65 page)

The Reverend Foot was only stopped momentarily.

"Sarah-Anne, that is Ms. Schenk, was a close friend, also from Michigan, and in feet if you've looked at your program, you will have read that for three years running she was Miss Upper Peninsula, which any man with eyesight will confirm." As a murmur began in the audience, he quickly added, "Miss Schenk will speak next."

Sarah-Anne strode to the stage and took the microphone.

"She looks like Ann-Margret in the role of a hopeless spinster in that English feature a few years back," Alistair said. I found myself giggling at how precise the description was.

"Hi," Sarah-Anne said. "My title is not, as several people already expressed to me earlier here, some joke! It's a quite real tide and I am quite proud of representing, not as some have suggested, environmentally damaging industries such as zinc mining and whole-forest logging, but the natural beauties of the lovely lake country that just happens to lie in the very geographical center of our continent."

The minute she opened her mouth, I felt unable to stifle a long, deep yawn. She nattered on about how and when she'd come to know Calvin, but some near fatal combination of tone and rhythm in her speech induced somnolence faster and more surely than the second act of
Siegfried.
I had to pinch myself awake, only to look around at people sitting very stiffly, very still, themselves no doubt also locked in the throes of her absolute verbal torpor. Vainly I fought it, until finally with no misgivings at all, I succumbed, and only came to again when Alistair leaned over from the pew behind.

"What say we have dinner after the show?"

"Show?" I tried to wake up enough to sputter outrage.

"My treat?!" Alistair's eyebrows danced with unspoken promise.

"...and after that humorous incident," the beauty queen was at last concluding, "we were friends for life!" If she expected some reaction, she would have to go around and awaken more listeners. "How close a friend was Cal?" she asked, I hoped rhetorically. "This close: Calvin picked out my entire last winter makeup.
That's
close."

"In the words of Debbie Reynolds," Alistair said, "ask any girl!"

Smugly Sarah-Anne curtsied, and couldn't help but let out a single long-repressed giggle before flouncing from the lectern.

Behind him, Alistair clearly enunciated to his neighbor, "... One case where the lobotomy seems to have taken beautifully!"

But the Reverend Foot was on his feet again, booming out in marmoreal tones, "Next to speak will be Calvin Coper-nicus Ritchie's colleague in theatrical productions, Mizz Francine Faces."

"No! Feee-ceees!" She made a moue and, grasping her teddy bear and substantial handbag, approached the lectern.

"Oh, brother!" Alistair said. "Is she going to spell it?"

"Hoooii!" She placed the stuffed animal over the lectern, so its head drooped over the edge. "I know," she responded to someone invisible. "The dust'll all rush to his head. But you know, he likes it. Likes it? He's addicted to it. I mean, what else does a teddy bear have to get him high? Okay, some people—some nameless people—do use stuffed an-i-mals for lewd and lascivious purposes, and I guess there's that..."

All the while rummaging through her enormous bag.

At last she located a small pad. "His name, by the way, is Sully. But I call him Silly. What I'm going to read in memory of Calvin is a poem I mentioned to him a lot which I learned in preschool and which Calvin said he also learned in preesk." She found the page, squinted, declared, "Glasses," and began rummaging in her bag again. The glasses were large and red plastic, with lenses shaped like '59 Buick headlights. She let her head fall to the shoulder, first one way then the other—obviously an acting method she'd learned to loosen up—and in her totally Bronx accent began: "An-i-mal crackers. And cocoa to drink. These, I think, are my fav-o-rite things, to eat. To eat. To eat and drink." She paused and smiled at the audience and sailed into verse two: "An-i-mal crackers. With lions and pandas. Giraffes and..."

"What
is
this
shit!"
asked a male voice from the front row.

Behind me, I heard Alistair loudly, incompletely hold in a guffaw.

"...horsies and birds with wings,'.' Mile. Faeces continued.

"Birds with
what
!?" The interrupter from the front row couldn't hold in his outrage: "All damn birds got
wings!"

Alistair's guffaw spilled out through his hands.

Undaunted, Miss Faeces continued: "I like them all. Like them all. To eat."

"You probably like to eat sum'in else, Miss Frenchy," the heckler intimated. Then, annoyed at someone's comment unheard by me, he loudly responded, "What do you mean, hush?" Turning around: "I'm here too. I'm not outside the building. And I know shit when I hear it."

"Let her finish!" someone shouted.

"Why?" he wanted to know.

"Let's get it over with. Or we'll be here all night."

But there was no chance of that. Deeply offended by the criticism, Mile. Faeces closed her pad with an audible slap upon the lectern, thrust it into her capacious bag, grabbed poor Sully out of his semirecumbent posture, and stomped away from the lectern, indeed right out of the chapel.

Alistair was enmeshed in mirth," half rolling onto his pew neighbor. She, rotund and primly dressed as an office manager, seemed to countenance my cousin's excessive demonstration with her own giggles.

Again a scuffle, as Reverend Foot stood up at the same time as the ninjas and Bernard Dixon. Bernard pushed his way to the lectern, immediately revealing that his had been the voice we'd just heard interrupting.

"I don't know who-all you are out there. The reverend and all says you was Calvin's friends, even though I don't recognize any of you—okay, yeah, I see you, Malcolm!"

"Cuz-a-rooni! Look!" Alistair whispered so loudly that everyone in four rows had to have heard it. "Didn't he used to beat up and rob Calvin every weekend for drug money back in San Francisco?"

"He used to be bad," a sedate woman in her sixties agreed, "but he's found Jesus!"

"Jesus better keep a tight grip on his wallet!"

"That's uncharitable."

"No one is uncharitable around Bernard," Alistair assured her. "Voluntarily or not!"

That scandalized her, and drew protests and calls of "hush" from around us, as Bernard continued.

"I just want say one thing that's kind gotten out of the way so far here today with all this Handel-in' and
Environmental-in' and Animal Cracker-in', and that's my man Calvin was a faggot, in case you didn't know, although how you couldn't if you really were his friend I can't say. An honest-to-god, sometimes fucked-up faggot, and who should know better than Calvin but myself? You know, cocksucker, take-it-up-the-ass faggot, which is how he got sick and died in the first place. And proud to be a faggot. No one's spoke about that. So I wanted to say it," Bernard added a bit lamely now that his anger was spewed. He seemed chastened at his own impulsiveness in standing up, or more probably at the blank expressions he now faced. "Thank you," he ended contritely and sat down.

Prodded by the reverend, evidently afraid of further spontaneous interruptions, the three ninjas stood up and pulled out of their shirts what turned out to be two smallish drums and a set of sticks.

"As you probably know, Calvin was into opera an' all, but he supported Pan-African arts too, and he got our group a grant to appear in junior-highs across New England. We recite and sing and play instruments and, well, you'll see."

Leonard dropped back and grasped his drum close to his lower torso. Andrew Reese stepped forward and clacked the sticks together, ceremonially announcing, "The Story of Prince Calvin!"

The rest was in patois. Or maybe in Swahili. It wasn't English, although it was undoubtedly exciting, both the narration—accompanied by sticks and drums—and those spots of solos—instrumental riffs and combos, as well as songs. It sounded wonderful, but it was so incomprehensible, so out there, it might as well have been Venusian.

Finally, the Reverend Mr. Foot said it was time for anyone among the congregation who wished to speak a few words in memory of the deceased.

Alistair pushed me. "Now's your chance."

"Stop!"

"Anyone?" Mr. Foot asked.

The reverend himself broke the silence by haltingly beginning to half mumble a eulogy which he'd evidently that moment just received, obviously written quite small on three-by-five index cards.

The brief eulogy over, Reverend Foot announced, "We will now sing a psalm from the Holy Scriptures. If you look in the pocket of the pew in front of you, you'll find..."

"That's my cue. I'm out of here!" Alistair said. "C'mon, Cuz, my reservation at Demetrio's is for eight. Mustn't be late."

For the twentieth time in my life, again completely embarrassed by Alistair, I also stood up, and as my pewmates scrabbled through their Psalters looking for the right page, I stumbled over them to get out.

Unfazed, Alistair didn't stop talking for instant. "The lobster gnocchi with black angel-hair pasta tastes like a twelve-year-old's scrotum.... And the waiters!"

Out in the fresh night air, I stopped and looked around. It had turned to night while I was inside, and now across the street the buildings of the United Nations Plaza were lit in three shades of yellow, framed by a polarizing cobalt sky featuring the ghost of a crescent moon.

It's beautiful, I thought. Then I considered: it's beautiful, yet it looks like a photo off one of those dollar postcards of New York you buy in Times Square.

"Fabulous view!" I heard behind me: Alistair, with an edge to his voice I couldn't quite make out. It was clear now that Alistair wasn't about simply to vanish as I would have preferred. He was going to hang on until he'd gotten what he wanted—which meant I would have to have dinner with him. It could have been worse.

"What was it Noel Coward said about the terrible potency of cheap music?" Alistair asked, rhetorically I was certain. "He should have included postcard views."

"I was just thinking the same thing."

"Terrifying, isn't it?" Alistair said.

More terrifying than he'd ever know, I wanted to say.

"Of course, nothing surprises me anymore," Alistair said. "Although I must say that memorial service came close."

"It
was
odd," I admitted.

"If we were any closer to Broadway, you could have sold tickets. Can you see the playbill? Miss Faeces and her addicted teddy! The Eddie Murphy Trio singing the adventures of Prince Calvin in Zulu!"

"You forgot Miss Upper Michigan Peninsula speechifying on the Wonders of Ecology."

"I wish I
could
forget America's cure for insomnia."

"The Handel aria wasn't bad."

"Sound the trumpets!" Alistair hummed and laughed. "Can you imagine how Bridey Murphy's card must read?"

"The diva of your choice..." I began.

"...alive or dead!" we finished it together.

Well, maybe, I allowed himself to think, this dinner might not be so unpleasant after all. One thing Alistair wasn't was stupid: he'd be aware of how little he could presume upon me. And it
had
been a long time since we'd even seen each other—six, seven years? It might prove amusing.

"If we're going to do a full critique," I heard the Alistair-like brittleness in my own voice, "we might as well begin with the reverend."

"You mean his Paul Robeson imitation?" Alistair said, his own voice dropping an octave. "Or his Stalinist revision of Calvin's history? I
thought
you'd pick up on that. And where did he dig up that phony middle name?"

"I
was
right! What
was
Calvin's middle name? Edward or...?"

"Albert was the name I read when I went through his wallet one day while he was in the kitchen making tea."

"You didn't."

"Just checking his age," Alistair said with complete aplomb. "You'd be astonished how many lie about it."

Six years supposedly allowed every cell in your body to die and be replaced. But not Alistair's. He seemed unchanged.

"And what about 'An-i-mal crackers and cocoa to drink,'" Alistair chanted in a Bronx accent, then cut in with "What is this shit!"

We laughed again.

"But the truth is, Cuz, I could have taken anything in there but that spectacle of spectacles, Bernard Dixon Reformed... looking like some dowdy statuary in Hyde Park.... That is where this runner stumbled."

"Did you know him in San Francisco?"

"Before. In L.A. He was hustling some of the fancier Beverly Hills gyms as a so-called 'athletic trainer.'"

"So you knew what he looked like?"

Alistair slid a hand through my arm and nodded toward where others who'd been in the chapel were now beginning to creep out. No explanation was needed. Together Alistair and I began to walk, Alistair aiming south.

"Cuz, when I first laid eyes on Bernard, he was like that six-foot solid-candy bunny made especially for Lilac Chocolates on Christopher Street every Easter.... You could have feasted for a month without hitting a single inedible inch."

The old, exaggerating Alistair.

"How much did he get from you?"

Alistair was offended. "Surely, you know no one steals from me and lives to tell the tale!... It was a friend he lifted from. And it was a Porsche! The friend got it back. Paid to get it back, actually. Had to go pick it up somewhere in Altadena." Alistair had to laugh. Serious again: "Very traumatic for him, of course." More laughter.

"He's an actor now. And a dancer.... He may have reformed."

"Makes no difference," Alistair assured me. "Big Bad Bernard has been felled by the mightiest of foes. Way beyond the reforming skills of any mere Jesus." And when I didn't understand: "Bernard's been grasped in the unforgiving talons of that archenemy of mankind, Eros—in the form of Miss San Salvador 1986."

"I notice."

"Did you notice how Bernard leaned forward every two seconds? He's in thrall. He's a footstool!" Alistair exulted. Adding: "I'm phoning my friend and telling him we already have the revenge we wanted. Here we are!"