Surrender, Dorothy (16 page)

At first, after Sara died, Shawn had decided to bail out, but then he saw how needy Adam was, and how he could easily fill that need. It was pleasurable to make the famous young playwright indebted to him. Shawn brought him meals and rubbed his shoulders and held him in bed at night. How hard would it have been for Shawn to have written
Take Us to Your Leader?
If only Shawn had thought of it! But instead of contemporary, biting social comedy, he had opted for an old-fashioned musical, and everyone knew the musical was dead.

Spinsters!
was singable and contained genuine characters, but it had very little chance of ever reaching a Broadway stage. It was a deeply unfashionable play for the nineties, whereas if Shawn had lived in the fifties, he would have been a celebrity in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition. Shawn would have been seen all around town, and asked to sit for photo shoots with Cartier-Bresson, and been interviewed by Walter Winchell and eaten shrimp cocktails late at night at Sardi’s. But the truth was that Shawn was out of style and no one was interested. Instead, everyone got all hot and bothered over plodding old Adam. So Shawn hung around the beach house, waiting.

And now this woman, Natalie Swerdlow, was here too, and she made everything much more tolerable for him. Her sadness made her seem deeply, soulfully kind; many wounded people appeared that way. Shawn wondered if his own mother would grieve for him if he died. She had once called Shawn up and asked, in her hard, heartland voice, whether he had “the AIDS.” There was something almost quaint about that “the.” It reminded
him of old-fashioned stories, in which people developed “the chilblains.” Probably he was being unfair in his assessment of his mother, but in a way he thought she was actually disappointed that he didn’t (at least not yet) have the AIDS. For if he had, then she could be rid of him once and for all, then mourn him fiercely and get over it. But they were stuck with each other—the cold, narrow mother and her failed, misunderstood faggot son.

He looked over at Natalie Swerdlow, who sat beside him in the tiny room, and it occurred to him that she was nothing like his mother. She was endlessly tolerant, and that was all anyone really wanted, wasn’t it? Natalie was the kind of mother who for some reason was in awe of Shawn Best. Which no one else on earth would ever be.

“You don’t want to get all involved in my problems, my HIV status, my pathetic life,” he said to her. “You’ve got enough to deal with.”

“I need whatever I can get,” said Natalie. “If I just think about Sara and nothing else, I will go wild.”

“‘I’m wild again,’ “Shawn suddenly began to sing. “Beguiled again / A simpering, whimpering child again …’”

“‘Bewitched,’ “Natalie joined in, and together their two imperfect voices began to sing, “‘bothered and bewildered / am I…’”

They sat comfortably together and smoked and sang. She knew all the same show tunes that he did, and in fact had seen most of the famous shows when she was young. She had seen Ethel Merman in
Gypsy,
and Carol Channing in
Hello, Dolly.
They sang silly songs too, like “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” their voices rising in nostalgic pleasure. The carpeting was surprisingly spongy, and the store was cool, and they might have sat like that for a long time, singing freely and smoking many cigarettes, but suddenly, in the middle of a giddy rendition of the line that went “Rub him outta the roll call / and drum him outta your dreams …,” there was a loud knock at the door.

“Excuse me!” called the salesman. “Are you
smoking
in
there?” They were quickly silent, looking at each other with a kind of desperate mirth. Natalie exhaled, filling the room with smoke. “You are!” cried the salesman triumphantly. “You are actually smoking in the dressing room! I’ll have to ask you both to leave. Right now.”

It hadn’t really occurred to either of them that smoking in the dressing room was a transgressive act. Now they quickly stamped out their cigarettes on the heels of their shoes and tried to wave the smoke from the air, but the room was so tiny that the smoke had nowhere to go. When they opened the door, it drifted out into the store. The salesman stood in front of them, rigidly clutching a bunch of wooden hangers. “Please purchase those clothes or remove them immediately,” he said. So Natalie went to the cash register and bought Shawn all the items, the credit card verification and the folding of the clothes taking place in haughty silence, and then they left the store. The little doorbell rang lightly once more as they crossed the threshold and went back outside, where they snorted and laughed like the adolescents that they had once both been, a long time ago.

8
Campfire Girls

There was a party one afternoon at a mansion on the water, and Adam was invited. He didn’t really want to go, but Shawn worked on him, telling him it would be good for him to get out of the house. This was true, of course, although Shawn’s motives surely had to do with his own desire to be at that party. Shawn longed for such invitations, Adam knew, and had rarely been able to edge his way into that world of wealth and canapés and light conversation.

On the day of the party, when Adam and Shawn came downstairs dressed in pale, slightly formal summer clothes, Natalie stood in the kitchen with her head in the refrigerator. She was ferreting through everything on the shelves, extracting ancient bottles and jars. She yanked hard on a bottle that gripped the glass shelf with its own glue. Finally the jar was uprooted, and Natalie peered in to see what it was.

“Chutney,” she said aloud to no one in particular. “Major Grey’s Peach Chutney. Does anyone know how old this is?”

Adam, standing in the doorway buttoning his cuffs, tried to recall. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “We got it three or four summers ago. We had an Indian dinner. I think it was Sara’s idea.”

Natalie gazed at the bottle with the thoughtful attentiveness of a mother gazing at her daughter’s face. “Sara was a chutney person,” she said quietly. She cradled the sorry-looking bottle in her hands, and at that moment Adam decided it was essential to get this woman out of the house. Otherwise, he could imagine her standing here forever, the refrigerator door left swinging wide, the chutney held tenderly in her useless hands. “Mrs. Swerdlow,” he said. “Finish what you’re doing and get dressed. You’re coming with us.”

T
HE PARTY WAS
held at the home of Paul and Sheila Normandy, noted patrons of the arts. Adam had initially met the couple backstage at a performance of his play; a stream of people often came backstage, including celebrities and friends of Adam’s parents (“It’s Adele Glucksman! From 15 Bluebird Court!”), as well as the mayor and a loose circle of wealthy friends of the producer, some of them Broadway investors. The Normandys fell into this last category, and while they hadn’t invested in his show, there would be future shows needing investors, and his agent, Mel Wolf, had wanted him to be charming backstage.

“But I don’t know how to be charming,” Adam nervously said to Sara after the curtain had come down one night and the actors were taking their bows. He and Sara sat in one of the tiny cinderblock dressing rooms; she was patiently retying his necktie, which he had knotted poorly, as usual.

“Yes you do,” she said. “They just want you to be yourself. The witty gay writer. Come on, you do that very well. You
are
charming, Adam; it’s not fake.”

Suddenly the Normandys appeared in the doorway of the dressing room, and Adam rose. His tie was neat now, and his hair newly combed. Sara had helped him become presentable, and he was grateful. Women
did
that, he thought; they tied your tie, they flooded you with confidence, and they were wonderful companions. He and Sara never ran out of things to talk about. She had been teaching him Japanese, and he had been reading plays with her. They had recently been through an Aristophanes phase and had just begun Tom Stoppard.

His lack of attraction to her was sometimes a source of frustration. He had never felt particularly bad about being homosexual; this frustration wasn’t grounded in self-loathing. Early on, Adam had known exactly what he was, what he liked, what pulled him into deep and tangled and exciting dreams. His parents had been fairly understanding, after a requisite crying jag and an insistence that he spend several sessions with a kindly female therapist in Great Neck. The therapist, Dr. Rachel Kline, was middle-aged and energetic and wore Indian-print dresses. She had found nothing wrong with Adam, and instead the two of them had played Yahtzee and shared a pot of raspberry tea during each chatty, friendly session.

So nothing
was
wrong with him, and that was still true. Sara had always insisted that he was extremely normal, much more so than she was. “I grew up raised by a totally narcissistic mother and no father,” she had said. “Where does that leave me?”

“
My
parents were extremely boring,” he had told her. “So middle-of-the-road and docile and boring that it probably warped me inside.”

“No,” she said, “you don’t understand. No one wants interesting parents. Interesting parents are a curse.” She paused. “My mother is very interesting,” she added pointedly. “Parents should be completely dull and ordinary and predictable. You want their relationship to be stable and incredibly boring, as though you would kill yourself if you had to be in that marriage.”

Neither Sara nor Adam wanted a boring marriage for themselves, nor did either of them want one of those Bloomsbury-type marriages that involved lots of furious letter-writing in lieu of sex. Sara wouldn’t settle for such a thing; she was deeply attracted to men—men who were attracted to her right back—and she would always seek them out and then report back to Adam. He, in turn, would sleep with men and report back to
her.

A few weeks after initially meeting the Normandys, Adam was invited to a dinner party at their Manhattan home, and he brought Sara as his date. The Normandys and their friends were so unlike the people he and Sara knew, whose idea of a dinner party was often potluck, with guests bringing falafel and brownies. But the Normandys had invited dozens of people, who were seated that evening around small, formal tables lit with rosy candles. He and Sara walked in arm in arm, and their mouths opened at the same moment. The opulence was too much for them, too stimulating.

Paul Normandy was squat and friendly and seemed to be waiting for his first heart attack to happen, while his wife was built like a praying mantis and draped in jewels. “Look at the way their skin shines,” Sara had whispered that night. “That’s not oil or sweat glands. It’s wealth; they’ve got the money glow.” Artwork could be found everywhere in the apartment, which was adorned with giant cracking canvases of eighteenth-century milkmaids and recent, disturbing oil paintings of dogs with their throats slashed. When canapés circulated, Sara and Adam tried to engage the waiters and waitresses in conversation, for who else was there to talk to? Who else was in their league?

Eventually, when Sheila Normandy came over to say hello, Adam became overcome by discomfort. “Hey, thanks for inviting us,” he’d said, giving his hostess’s hand a shake and crushing her fingers with their hard, pointy rings. Sheila winced, and Adam pulled back in apology. Then he proceeded to drop a piece of salmon-and-chervil roulade down the front of his dinner jacket,
and excused himself to go clean himself up, leaving Sara to fend for herself.

In the Normandys’ bathroom, frantically dabbing at the stain with a wet yard of toilet paper, he’d looked in the mirror and seen himself as he was: not the gay Neil Simon at all, but instead an ordinary-looking person who had no business here in this bathroom that was as big as his entire apartment, with gold faucets shaped like fish. All he could think of, looking at the fish faucets with their wide-open mouths, was fellatio. He fantasized about lowering his pants and letting some man—the Normandys’ butler, perhaps, a cute British guy—take Adam’s penis in his mouth. When he emerged from the bathroom, embarrassed by his own thoughts and spattered with water, Sara pulled him aside, yanking him into an alcove beneath a lesser Seurat; they were so close to it that all colors had separated into a field of discrete dots, and they couldn’t even see what the image was supposed to be.

“You’ve left me here for hours,” she said.

“It hasn’t been hours.”

“Yes it has,” she said, her voice petulant, but he decided to forgive her. Everyone always forgave Sara.

“Well,” Adam said, “I’m here to rescue you.” He took Sara’s arm, feeling the reassuring brush of velvet sleeve against his wrist as they went in to dinner.

Now, walking up the driveway of the Normandys’ summer home without Sara, Adam thought of how, if she were here, she would quiet his anxieties. He was barely half himself without her; he was small, shriveled, joyless, abstracted. Her mother was beside him instead, and everything was out of alignment. He suddenly felt on the verge of weeping as he glanced over at this woman who was like Sara but not—this woman who had given birth to the woman he loved. All around them, valets directed cars into parking spots and guests approached the house, the women dressed in pale linen and clutching purses no bigger than summer fruit, the men sauntering casually up the steps. Just as
reluctance threatened to overtake him, Natalie turned and said, “I don’t want to do this. I want to go home.”

“Me too,” said Adam. “So let’s go.”

“No, wait, it’ll be fine, you guys,” Shawn said quickly. “We’ll have drinks. We won’t have to talk to anyone but ourselves.” He was almost pleading, so much did he want to be at this party. “Please,” he said. “It’ll do us all some good.” And so they kept walking. As they headed toward the house, Adam gazed at the grounds. Somewhere out back, he had heard, there was a helicopter, resting silently on its own launch pad. He mounted the wide porch steps numbly, wondering if he would ever take pleasure in anything again, if he would ever feel comfortable in the world without Sara.