An Idol for Others (48 page)

“I don’t know, Tommy. Doesn’t it have an awful lot to do with being in love? I may’ve mentioned the fact that I never have been. I’ve always loved sex with boys. Girls too. I think it’s going to be better with you than it’s ever been.”

Tom dropped a hand from the wheel and gave his knee a squeeze. “Just keep saying things like that, and I may yet turn into a demon lover. Frankly, I’m hooked on the phallic. It’s a deep, dark secret–I’ve always felt so silly dreaming of big cocks–but in your case it has a certain relevance.
Fantastic
is the only word for it, darling. I’m terrified of becoming a slave to it. No, not really. I’m not going to be a slave to anything anymore, but I’m going to let myself fall in love with you more thoroughly than anybody’s ever been in love before. I want to make you fall in love with me in the same way, no holds barred. Do you think you’re ready for that?”

“Yes, Tommy. If it isn’t going to be like that, I shouldn’t be here. There’ve been times today when I’ve been happier than I thought anybody could be–right now more than ever.” He sat with an arm running along Tom’s shoulders. He gave him a little hug. “Do we believe in love at first sight?”

“Of course, that’s the only way the big things get started. It means we’re not apt to fall out of love, but we may have a long way to go before we’re sure we can make it work.”

“Yes, because I’m me. It’ll take time before I can trust myself. I don’t think I ever have really. I have my little genius that’s made it awfully easy to sidestep the big issues. I’ve coasted on it right from the start. I don’t mean I haven’t worked hard, but that’s another matter. You’re going to have to slap me down if you catch me playing my tricks with you. I maybe shouldn’t say it, but your life with John sounds like a nightmare. I’m much too egotistical to play it like that, although I admit. I talked to Mark along the same lines. My public life with Clara and him in the attic somewhere. I haven’t got any ideas like that about you, but I had to prove it to myself. That was the point of cutting the award. I don’t want any cover. I want to live with you openly. I don’t want to know anybody you don’t know. I want everything about our life to be ours.”

“You know, this may be a miracle. Maybe we’re made for each other. I’m going to tell you something fairly weird. I’ve hinted around about Mark, but the fact is that ever since he told me about you, I’ve had a feeling that we belonged with each other. I guess he made you sound like someone I wanted, and it just grew from there. It was very strange, knowing all these years that there was somebody out there that I’d eventually be with–strange and wonderful. When I met David and he started talking about you, I knew it was going to happen. I was with John, but I began to be unfaithful to him with you. My being in New York the last few weeks wasn’t exactly a coincidence. David had promised to introduce us. When it happened today, I had to get away from you to make sure it wasn’t all happening in my head. Twenty years of wanting you, Mr. Makin. Maybe that’s why we know what we want without having to talk about it.”

They didn’t stop talking about it. Tom drove fast and very well, so Walter could relax into the growing comfort of being with him. He felt that they were utterly complete together. It was the best way he could express it to himself. Tom’s fanciful tale of wanting him for 20 years was part of it. It might explain why he had been able to respond so unguardedly almost from the start and why he felt so confident with him. He didn’t know what resistance in himself might be aroused once they tried to settle down to daily life together, but he was sure they were going to have a wonderful trip to the Coast.

It was almost midnight when they pulled into a brightly lit luxurious-looking motel. The
VACANCY
sign was on. Tom stopped the car near some others.

“I don’t suppose you know how to take a room in a motel,” he said. “Have you ever been in one?”

“I’ve heard of them.”

Tom chuckled. “OK. Wait here.”

“Be sure to keep account of all this.”

“Why?”

“So I can pay you back, dummy.”

“Really, darling.” He turned and put a hand on Walter’s and looked at him in the half-light from the motel. His eyes were only a glitter in the shadow of the deep sockets. “I thought we knew things we didn’t have to say. What’s mine is yours, and vice versa, with the understanding that neither of us spends any big money without discussing it first. John kept accounts. That’s not us. I’m assuming, naturally, that this is just the beginning of a long life together.”

“Is that the way it’s going to be?” Walter asked, stroking the long fingers interlaced with his.

“That’s the way it’s going to be.”

“It sounds like us. Now get in there and get us a room, or I’m going to make love to you out here.”

Tom climbed out of the car, and Walter watched his graceful figure moving toward a neon sign saying
OFFICE.
He thought of the award. The ceremony would be over by now. He hadn’t felt any regrets all evening nor even any curiosity about what had taken place. He was too absorbed in the wonder of finding Tom to feel any loss for Clara and family and home. This might come later, but he hoped that by then his spirit would have revived and expanded and become so intertwined with Tom’s that the past would have melted away into a harmless memory. He and Clara had created a brightly bedizened life, but he had known for a long time that beneath the splendid panoply the machinery ran in a small rut of self-deception. He took a deep breath of real air, and his heart swelled with happiness as he saw the figure returning.

Tom waved a key and pulled a suitcase out of the car, and they moved into a pleasantly antiseptic room. They took turns freshening up in the bathroom.

“Somerset Maugham says you know you’re in love if you can use the other person’s toothbrush,” Walter said as Tom emerged looking dewy and country-boy-fresh from the shower. “Can I use yours?”

“Who else’s?”

They fell into bed and gathered each other close with moans of relief and need. They were both emotionally drained and physically exhausted. Their sex play was brief and schoolboyish and happy.

“When I wake up and find you beside me, I may start yelling with joy,” Tom said, his eyes soft with love and sleep. “I just wanted to warn you beforehand.”

“Wake me first, and we’ll yell together. Our first night. We’re going to sleep together tonight and tomorrow night and every night, I hope, forever. Do you sleep on your back or how?”

“Wrapped around you.”

Tom loved again. After the months of frozen anguish and heartbreak, everything was thawing and colliding within him. It was almost too agonizing to be borne. For the moment, all his mind could encompass was the depth of his body’s bliss.

“Oh, Tommy. You feel so wonderful. I could stay like this for a week.”

They turned out the lights and nibbled each other’s lips and laughed softly until they were breathing deeply, and they slept. They woke early in each other’s arms.

“What are you going to wear for the next few days?” Tom asked as they were putting on their shorts.

“Your things, I suppose.”

“Can you? You’re such a strapping lad.”

“I can wear your pants.” Walter demonstrated by fishing a pair of jeans out of the suitcase and putting them on.

“God Almighty. Sexier and sexier. If you show that basket in Sausalito, you’ll be mobbed.”

“I’m counting on you to keep the crowds under control.” He found a shirt and put it on. “A bit tight across the chest, but it’ll do. How’s that?”

“Wonderful. We won’t be able to tell which of us is which before we’ve even begun to do it all in bed. I don’t know what we can do about certain glaring differences.”

Walter went to him as he was about to put on his shirt and ran his hands lovingly over his bare chest. “I’ve had about enough out of you. Now it’s your turn. I adore your body. Your cock is the way I’d design a cock for worldwide distribution. Your face is so beautiful with intelligence and sweetness and humor and love that it makes me want to weep half the time. I connect with everything about you and everything you are, including your beautiful voice. Good morning, beloved Tommy.”

“Good morning, darling Uncle Walt.”

They were well into Ohio when Tom said, “Darling, do you mind if we drive like hell for the next few days? I thought we might take it easy and enjoy it, but there’s something unreal about it that bothers me. Traveling isn’t like ordinary life.”

“I know what you mean. Let’s get it over with quickly. I’d forgotten how it is. I won’t let you do this alone again.”

“That’s good. Everything’s good. That’s why I’m in a hurry to start living with you. It was so beautiful waking up with you this morning and fooling around getting dressed. I wanted it to go on through a normal day, everything growing and shifting and getting more exciting until we’d be back in bed again whenever we felt like it. I guess I feel sort of the way you did about the award. Contact isn’t broken when we’re driving, but we have to keep it in its place. You’ll tell me if you start getting tired?”

“Don’t worry about me. You haven’t worked in the theater. I can go for days with only a couple of hours’ sleep. Didn’t you say you had to be back in five or six days anyway?”

“That was yesterday. I promised to be back for a friend’s birthday. He’s in love with me, and I’m very fond of him. We’ve toyed with the idea of getting together. That’s a fairly dead issue now.”

They drove through or near many places where Walter had been with shows, and he told stories that made them both laugh. They took turns driving and stayed on the road well into the night. The weather remained warm and mostly sunny. Nothing occurred to test their tempers or high spirits. Their sexual activity remained brief, tentative, almost casual. Walter found it restful and sweet and completely satisfying. He felt in Tom a holding back, a reluctance probably to go too far in circumstances where it would be impossible to explore and evaluate new experience. They weren’t, as Tom had put it, expressing their love with their bodies, and Walter was content to wait. Being with him, looking at him all day and holding him at night, was all the expression of love he needed.

“Do we know each other well enough now for you to tell me what happened when you were 38?” Tom asked in Iowa.

“We’re beginning to read each other’s minds. I was just getting around to that. Actually, it was important. It involves a little family history.” Walter told him about Fay and their baby. “Jerry must have spread that story you heard about my being in a gay bar when I was Father of the Year. Nobody else knew. He was a monster, a real screaming little queen, making wild passes at me. It’s very peculiar being faced with a son you don’t know and yet feeling responsible for him. He was only 18. I decided to take him in hand. I did, in many more ways than one.”

“How fascinating. You mean you …”

“Yeah, I took him to bed. It was only sort of half incest. I didn’t recognize him when I met him. I hadn’t seen him since he was a child. Of course, he didn’t know I was his father and still doesn’t. There was nothing remotely attractive about him, skinny, no more than pleasant-looking with all the worst faggot mannerisms–calling himself Geraldine, that sort of thing–and yet when I knew who he was, he drew me like a magnet. I wanted to straighten him out–if he’d been older I wouldn’t have bothered to try–and the only way I could reach him was through sex. He was mad for me and wouldn’t listen to anything I said until I took him. I still don’t understand it, but there was something wildly sexy about fucking my own son. He inherited his cock from his Daddy, which should’ve finally put me off–a gruesome, great thing on a scrawny kid–but it didn’t. I suppose you might say we had an affair for several months, but to me it was more like a seminar in the good life. In spite of sex, I loved him like a son. And it worked. I got him over all the faggot stuff. I made him see that there was more to life than a big cock. I got him going to a gym. God knows what went on there, but it certainly improved his looks. I talked to him about love, which he’d apparently never heard of. I also raised hell with his mother. By fucking him, I think I made myself a better father to him than I’ve been to my real sons. When I last saw him, he was living with a nice guy he was in love with. Come to think of it, it seems to me I heard he’d moved out to San Francisco. Have you ever heard of him? Gerald Kennicutt?”

“No.”

“In any case, I made such a strong case for homosexuality and a decent life that I finally began to understand what I’d missed with Mark. After giving the word to Jerry, I swore that if it ever happened to me again, I’d grab it. It’s mostly thanks to him that I had the sense to cleave to you. Are you shocked?”

“I’d like a moment of silent gratitude to Jerry. I’m stunned, darling. You’re incredible. You give the impression of being totally in charge of life in a slightly inhuman way, as if you’d never had any doubt or been thrown off course. It’s not that at all. You have a fantastic confidence, it’s really self-confidence, in humanity, as if people could supply all the answers. I have a feeling that I could turn myself over to you and you’d know exactly which strings to pull to make me work. It’s a temptation to resist. I’m beginning to realize that you’re a great man, Walter. I intend to make myself good enough for you.”

“Do you suppose we could be prejudiced about each other? I have the distinct impression that you are already.”

In Colorado they began to find Walter looking at them everywhere from the cover of
Time
.

“He looks so glamorous,” Tom said. “I never get to meet people like that. Where did I pick up this tramp? Shouldn’t we buy a copy?”

“God, no. Everything in its good time. When we get there, I’ll call David and find out what’s been going on. Drive on.” He stretched and looked at Tom and immediately had an erection. He slid his arm along his shoulders and gave him a little hug. “Oh, Tommy. Do you have any idea what you do to me? I’m so happy that I feel as if the top of my head is going to blow off. I can’t begin to say it. You might be able to write it, and I want to try to put it on the stage someday, but at times my body almost goes mad wanting to tell you what it’s like.”