Naked Came the Stranger (24 page)

They had met at Fire Island. Both of them had come to Cherry Grove
for a weekend of pleasure and relaxation. It was a grand place for
meeting people, and it didn't matter that some of the men were
married because the emphasis was on chance sex rather than permanent
liaison. Actually married men had never done much for Willoughby:
Either they were AC-DC or they were wholly gay but had married hoping
to fool the straight world. Willoughby felt sorry for them. His own
sexuality was devoid of ambivalence. He couldn't understand any man
who preferred women. As far as he was concerned, women simply were
not sexy. You might go out with a woman, but you certainly wouldn't
want to sleep with one. And all the noise about homosexuality being a
sickness absolutely drove Willoughby up the wall. That was just
something else the psychiatrists had made up to swell their
practices. Willoughby had never been sick a day in his life. He was
gay because he preferred it that way. And it was perfectly healthy.
After all, you could go back to the Greek philosophers.

In any case, he and Hank had met in a bar where they were doing
the Madison, a group dance that had been popular back then. As he
remembered, they were doing it with about twenty other men and three
dykes. The Madison's major advantage was that it permitted men to
dance with each other without risking arrest. That was important
because the mainland police who patrolled the area had adopted a
live-and-let-live policy toward Cherry Grove. As long as there was no
public flouting of the law, they left the inhabitants pretty much
alone. Anyway, it had been a marvelous night. Willoughby still
remembered the fluffy orange sweater he had worn, and the tight
chinos that had bulged with the kapok he had inserted in his jock.
Hank had worn a plain white sport shirt and gray slacks; his lank
ruggedness had excited Willoughby immediately. It turned out that
Willoughby, an interior decorator, and Hank, a computer programmer,
had a great deal in common besides their subscriptions to Mattachine
Society literature. They both were interested in art, the theater,
books, cooking, riding and music. That same night, they went to bed
together, and it was beautiful. It had a depth and meaning
transcending anything either had ever experienced. It was far above
the meaningless physical contact available at the "meat rack" –
a clearing at the end of a boardwalk that was used for hit-or-miss,
night-shrouded sex encounters. Soon afterward, they began living
together. At first, they had shared a Manhattan apartment. Then, like
many other young couples, they had decided to move to the suburbs.
King's Neck had been especially attractive. It was countrified and
yet close-in. Their being gay had never constituted a problem. Hank
and Willoughby sometimes joked that their residence in King's Neck
represented token integration. In fact, Willoughby believed that many
of their neighbors boasted to friends about having a pair of
homosexuals domiciled in the area. It gave King's Neck a certain
sophistication. They were frequently invited to dinner parties in the
community, and Willoughby and Hank had given a few parties of their
own in return. Lately, Willoughby had been considering joining the
garden club.

As the ferry neared Davis Park, to which they had been invited by
some straight friends, Willoughby looked around. Hank was somewhere
at the other end of the boat. As for Willoughby, he was surrounded by
jauntily dressed young men with dark horn-rimmed glasses and by girls
equipped for the weekend with hemp baskets, canvas suitcases, and
paper shopping bags. The bags were crammed, for the most part with
cornflakes and gin. The girls were mostly career women from East Side
apartments; uniformly frantic-faced and dressed in tight white pants
or patterned bell-bottoms. As a matter of fact, it was their very
uniformity that made him spot Gillian Blake. She stood out.
Willoughby knew Gillian on a small-talk basis: She and her husband
had attended a few parties both in the city and in King's Neck where
he and Hank had also been guests. Blake was an abysmal square, but
Willoughby found Gillian likable. For a woman, he thought, Gillian
wasn't bad-looking. There was a certain… litheness about
her.

Gillian saw him and motioned for him to join her.

"Well," he said. "It's good to see you. I mean, most of these
people are so utterly depressing."

"Yes," she said, "Mad Ave. on the make. But what are you doing
here?"

"Hank and I are staying with some friends," Willoughby explained.
"And we're looking forward to it ever so much. You know, we haven't
been to a sixish in such a long time."

"I feel the same way," she said. "Everybody needs a sixish now and
then."

Willoughby laughed. Actually, the sixish was a rather charming
custom. It was practically a tribal rite for the single people of
Fire Island, especially Davis Park. The sixish was an evening
cocktail party to which each guest brought his own drink. Some
brought mayonnaise jars full of martinis, while others carried
measuring cups filled with bourbon, and they all gathered where the
noise was. They crowded onto the porch of one of the stilt-supported
houses and jammed into one another and made social contacts. Most of
the guests only gave their first names and occupations. Frequently
they lied about their jobs, saying they were copy writers or
television producers when they actually were clerks or stenographers.
Eventually they paired for the evening. One of the rules was that you
never selected anyone from the house at which you were staying. The
people who stayed at a house usually were chipping in to rent it for
the summer. They also shared expenses and cooking and housekeeping
duties. Sleeping with somebody in your own house could lead to all
sorts of complications within the group. The principle of exogamy had
a very practical basis, Willoughby reflected.

As a whole, he thought, Fire Island was an anthropologist's
delight. Each community was, to some extent, different. There was
Ocean Beach, which was solidly built up and even had a small
year-round community that necessitated a school. Ocean Beach was
famous for summer residents who were prominent in the arts and in the
entertainment world. There was Kismet, a middle-class community that
included some interestingly built homes, a bar and a tennis court.
There was Fire Island Pines, which was beginning to turn gay around
the edges, and there was Cherry Grove, which was the loveliest
community on Fire Island. Cherry Grove included a good hotel,
gourmet-level restaurants, and a cornucopia of artistically decorated
and beautifully kept summer homes. There was also Davis Park, which
once had been a quiet beach for young marrieds in search of low
rentals and solitude, and which now was a popular meeting ground for
singles – most of them weekend refugees from such East Side
hangouts as Friday's and Maxwell's Plum. They ranged in age from
their early twenties into their late thirties, and there were a few
men in their early forties. On weekends, they thundered herdlike off
the Long Island Railroad trains at Bay Shore and Sayville and piled
into taxis for mad dashes to the ferry docks. Willoughby smiled at
Gillian. "You'll have to look us up," he said.

"Without fail," said Gillian. "But where's Hank?"

"Oh, we're having a silly quarrel," Willoughby said.

"How about you? Where's your husband?"

"He's not here," Gillian said. She added a tone of mock melodrama
to her voice. "I'm on my own."

"Marvelous," said Willoughby. "That should be some sixish."

"Which one?"

"Whichever one you're at."

"Willy," said Gillian, "you're a real doll."

"I try to be," he said, simpering, and they both laughed. The
ferry backed into the slip with a jolt, and the weekenders scrambled
for their cargoes of liquor, food and clever hats. From now until
they got on the 7:00 p.m. ferry Sunday, they would be carefree
vacationers. At least they would try to think of themselves that way.
They would do their best to make merry and each other. And each of
them would feel – or at least he'd pretend he felt that way
– that he was really living. Heterosexuals, thought Willoughby,
you had to feel sorry for them.

Gillian said she would look up him and Hank later on, and joined
a, group of friends waiting on the dock for her. Willoughby waited
for Hank. When he saw him, Willoughby felt as if he were choking.
There was a stab of pain in his very heart. Hank was with a young man
– a slim, dark-haired young man in his early twenties. The
young man was obviously gay, and he was looking adoringly at
Hank.

Willoughby fought for control of himself. He tried to strike a
casual note. "Hi there," he said.

"Hello, Willoughby." Hank's voice was cold, impersonal. He could
have been talking to a stranger. Then he turned to the young man.
"See you later, Vince," he said. The note of anticipation was obvious
in his voice, and Willoughby knew they had already made an
arrangement to meet that night.

"You bet, Hank," the young man answered. He grinned impudently at
Willoughby.

A few minutes later, Willoughby and Hank were arguing in their
room. "See you later, Vince," Willoughby mimicked.

"Don't kid me," Hank said. "You only wish you saw him first."

"You bitch!" said Willoughby.

"You ought to know," Hank said. "When it comes to bitches, you
wrote the book."

"And to think I loved you," said Willoughby.

Hank laughed derisively. "Oh come off it, Willoughby. You don't
know what love is."

"Do you think Vince or whatever his name is knows?"

"You know something, Willoughby? You're getting to be an absolute
bore."

"l suppose you're meeting him some place."

"As a matter of fact, we're going to take a beach buggy to Cherry
Grove."

"You bitch!" Willoughby screamed. "You dirty bitch!" He threw a
shoe at Hank's departing figure. Then he fell sobbing on the bed. How
could Hank do a thing like that? He was giving Hank the best years of
his life. The bitch! Willoughby thought his heart would break. By
sixish time, Willoughby was feeling considerably better. He couldn't
believe that Hank would remain angry at him. After all, that Vince
was just a boy. And he was cheap and flashy; you might sleep with him
but you wouldn't want to live with him. Besides, Hank had been
faithful to Willoughby for a long time. Perhaps a little fling would
be good for him. And Willoughby had his own secret. He had once
cheated on Hank. There was a hairdresser whom he had met at a gay bar
in the city. It had been just a single incident and it had really
meant nothing. He had never told Hank about it.

Also, the sixish had set up Willoughby. It had been ages since he
had been to a party on Fire Island. Davis Park was a pretty straight
community, but then you never knew whom you might meet. Maybe he just
might have an adventure of his own. More and more people were going
gay these days. Maybe some day they would outnumber the straights.
Then heterosexuality would be the deviation.

Willoughby checked his make-up, and put on sandals, tight blue
slacks and a pink sweater. He filled a peanut butter jar, provided by
his hosts, with martinis, and he was ready. Sixish, he thought, here
I come! He wondered what Hank was doing. Oh tush, he thought, the
hell with Hank. Willoughby looked in the mirror and ran a comb
through his hair. He stood there preening for a moment. He wasn't
over the hill yet, he thought. He wiggled his behind and walked out
into the sea-rustled evening.

Gillian Blake was at the second place he tried; a weathered pine
cottage with a crowd milling on the porch. There were noise and
bustle and the informal flux and color that went with the seaside.
Most of the guests were groupers – the word for people sharing
summer rentals – and they all seemed to be straight. That was
perfectly all right with Willoughby because most of the men seemed
singularly unattractive – at least there was no one for whom he
sensed instant chemistry. He decided that he might as well talk to
Gillian, whose pantherish quality was enhanced by black pants and a
black-ribbed sleeveless sweater.

"Fancy meeting you here," he said.

"Yes, isn't it a coincidence?" said Gillian, her tongue running
across the roof of her mouth as she gave him a quick catlike grin.
Her eyes were sparkling, and her hair was soft and lustrous as it
caressed her shoulders. She actually was quite attractive. For a
girl, that is.

"You look charming," he said.

"Thanks," said Gillian. "You look very nice, too. I just love your
sweater."

"I bought it in the Village," Willoughby said, and he gave her the
name of the shop. They sipped at their jars, and talked clothes and
decorating. Finally, Gillian mentioned Hank's absence.

"I'm not his keeper," Willoughby said.

"That's very wise," said Gillian. "It's a sensible way to look at
it. It's awful when somebody tries to push you, to put you in a
box."

Willoughby looked at her with new respect. "You know, you really
are very sensitive."

"You have no idea," she said.

"I'm beginning to," Willoughby said, and he thought that he had
never enjoyed a woman's company so much before. She was an
exceptional person, he thought. They sipped some more and looked
around them. The aura was one of noise and nervousness. Couples were
beginning to link arms and walk off to the beach and the embrace of
the night.

"They're too much, aren't they?" said Gillian.

"Yes, they're so utterly frantic."

"Don't be hard on them," she said, laughing. "They're not as
sophisticated as you are. They're just simple heterosexuals."

Willoughby grinned. "I know. It's just too terrible the way they
carry on. They do such awful things to each other."

"Yes," said Gillian. "You have to pity them, the poor things. I
mean, it's a sickness."