Bettyville (18 page)

Steven's new boyfriend got him into one of the best doctors in the city, but I still called him every morning, to make sure he knew I was on his side and to make certain that he was still there at his desk, where he should be. He had to stay in place. I could not watch him fall. Things were going so fast, there was no way to take in what was going to happen to Steven or what was going to happen at all. Kevin was down. Tim went down. Bill went down. Jim went down. Richard went down. He was the nicest man I ever knew
.

There was nothing to be done. We just watched them disappear. I had heard of the Catholic tradition of lighting candles for the sick and to bless the dying. After work every few weeks or so I went to Saint Patrick's, paid a dollar for each of the flat round pieces of wax, and lit the candles in the dim light of the huge church. As Betty and I had walked through Madison naming names, so now I walked through Carroll Gardens, and Park Slope, and the Village, and the Upper West Side, asking for help for my friends.

In Missouri, almost every gay man I knew went down: John, who sold me button-fly Levi 501s; John, the hairdresser with an A-frame overlooking the river; Jim, the one everyone wanted. Maybe the biggest shock to some of my friends was the fact that even beauty was no protection.

Before I came to New York, I had taken a summer course in how to get a job in book publishing. The man who ran it was shy, extremely closeted, and eccentric, despite his great desire to be interesting, a quest that took him to many of the world's less traveled places. Maybe he could be himself only when he was far from home.

Two years or so after we had moved to New York, he came to a party in Carroll Gardens. It went on late and I went to bed before some people left. In the morning, I woke to find him sitting on my bed next to me, his warm hand on my bare back. Not long after that, he disappeared. We asked around, but no one could ever discover what became of him.

. . .

In the spring of my first year in the city, my parents arrived for a visit. I wanted it to be as memorable as I could make it because I didn't know what the future was going to bring or if I would ever make it home again. For weeks, my mother called to find out our plans so that she could pack the right things. She worried over her outfits, planned to bring her best suits and jewelry. There was discussion of blouses, bracelets. Although my father didn't seem especially excited, Betty asked me over and over where we would go, whether we could see the Plaza or the place where they did
The Today Show,
if we would make it to Barneys, which someone was always talking about on television. After I told her that the women in New York tended to wear black, she purchased a chic raincoat in that shade.

At the airport, standing by the baggage claim in that coat, she looked like a New York lady who could hold her own with anyone, a Wall Street woman or someone successful, just back from a business trip. But when we stepped out into the taxi line, the clouds opened and it poured. Betty was frantic. “But you have a raincoat on,” I reminded her.

“I know,” she answered, “but I don't want it to actually get rained on. You didn't tell me it was going to rain.”

“I predict the weather now?”

“You knew.”

That night we went to see, appropriately,
Sunday in the Park with George,
and before the theater met Steven, who wanted to see them. He had taken up with an anesthesiologist and was living on the Upper West Side with him and a remarkably large Tamara de Lempicka. He couldn't wait to tell my parents that he lived with a doctor. After he had shared the news, my mother looked down at her hands and said, “Well, that will be handy if you get sick.” Steven stared across the table, looking frightened for a second. “She means like with a cold is all,” I said.

My parents weren't crazy about the show, but at the end there was an extraordinary song called “Sunday,” sung by the entire cast. It was the real thing, the goose bump experience, hitting somewhere between jubilation and sorrow, instilling a little of both. One voice—a woman who it seemed was trained for the opera—soared over all the rest, and the first time I heard her, bringing the humor and its emotion further, I took my father's hand and squeezed it. Leaning over, I whispered to him, “This would not be the time to sing along.”

During the two previous hours, through all the songs and the changing of the sets, and the intermission when my mother watched the many glamorous people, I wondered if we would ever sit in another theater together or if there would be another trip, or if they would ever recover if I died. I wondered if my father would ever sing again.

The next day they visited our apartment in Brooklyn. On the subway, I told Betty there were hookers at the Waldorf. “What did they look like?” she wanted to know. “I'll bet there are some on this train right now. We'd never know.” We met my roommates, had coffee and sweet rolls. The blackened tub was a concern. I said it had been painted after a gangster was shot there.

Basically, they thought the entire apartment seemed like a potential crime scene. My father, always concerned about my living in New York—a place where he felt certain I would get hurt in some way—looked around and asked, “So this is how you want to live?”

Betty was less concerned. “Things are different here. Let him go,” she said. “Let him go.”

She glanced at me as if he just couldn't understand city people like ourselves. She was in an excited, festive mood and wanted to get out of Brooklyn as soon as possible. She was determined to shop. That afternoon at Saks, because I wanted her to have something to remember the trip and maybe me, I bought her a blue St. John knit sweater with black-and-white stripes on the collar, paying with money she had sent the week before. She bought me some Giorgio Armani pants. “The way they're cut,” she said, “you won't want to gain a pound.”

At Saks, Betty stopped at every floor, looked over what seemed like every piece of women's apparel, eyed every New York woman as if she wanted to know everything about her life. My mother always loses track of time in department stores, but this time it was worse. “I just want to see everyone. It's Saturday afternoon. That girl looks like the one on
L.A. Law
.”

“I love a tall woman,” a clerk told Betty as she lingered over some dresses. Betty was ecstatic. I didn't say that my mother had spent her whole life trying to look shorter, hated being taller than all the women and many of the men. “The models are all tall,” the clerk said.

“I've heard a lot of them are foreign,” Betty replied.

. . .

When my mother shopped in St. Louis, at Stix or Famous-Barr, or Montaldo's, or Saks, Mammy was in her mind as she searched for hours, hunting out the bargains, looking for outfits. Time and again, Betty brought home clothes from the city, unwrapped and carefully unfolded them, tried them on in front of the mirror, frowned at herself, walked through the halls in them, looking kind of guilty.

Mammy would always look up and say something like, “What did you pay for that?” or “How are you going to get any wear out of that?”

The dresses and shoes and blouses and skirts would wait in their boxes, unworn, until my mother's next trip to St. Louis, where she returned them, ready to begin the whole process again. Every trip to St. Louis began with the returns. It still does.

. . .

When my father and I were ready to leave Saks, Betty said, “Go, I'll get a taxi home.” She wanted to stay, I think, to be there alone and wander the aisles and see the people and imagine, as I did in such stores, buying the best things and taking them home to a fancy place. She wanted to be on her own in the city for a little bit, to hail her own taxi, to see what it would be like if life had led her somewhere far different than her home. When she returned to the hotel, she was especially cheerful, as if she had pulled off something extraordinary. She had fallen into conversation with a woman in the shoe department. A woman from New Jersey. Betty said she was nice, but she would never go to New Jersey for a haircut. “It did like this in back,” she said of the woman's style, waving her hand and rolling her eyes.

. . .

The next day, I took them to Barneys, where the movie stars shopped. Just inside the door, before we could decide on a place or time to meet, Betty disappeared into the crowds, as she always did when the three of us went shopping together at someplace nice. “Wham,” my father said, “and she's off.”

He looked around a bit but quickly stationed himself near what for him was the highlight of the store: a large tank of large tropical fish shimmering magically under a special light in brilliant colors—red and black, blue and yellow. They were exquisite, these fish, and my father's eyes followed them as they darted and undulated. I had read somewhere that the collection had cost more than seventy thousand dollars. It was a stunning assortment, and I stood with him in front of the tank, looking at our reflections in the glass tank as he tapped occasionally to draw the attention of the extraordinary creatures. He was transfixed; they would not let him turn away, but moments later as he surveyed the rest of the floor, he looked sour, put off by most of what surrounded him. He looked at me and said, “Except for these fish, this place is all bullshit. Strictly swindle. I hope you won't fall in with a lot of phonies.”

After an hour or more, my mother suddenly appeared, looking upset, like someone had slapped her or hurt her feelings badly.

“I've looked and looked for you,” she said. “I couldn't find you. I was standing there by the scarves and someone took my purse. A woman next to me tried to help and I talked to someone in security who let the police know, but the man behind the counter was rude. He made me feel like an idiot.” She was broken, so crestfallen. She took us back to the counter where it had all happened, and the clerk—a sexy Puerto Rican queen in eye makeup—kept saying over and over that it was all her fault, that she should have watched her bag. “We have women with ten-thousand-dollar purses here. This place is crawling with thieves. You can't just set something down.”

My father did not seem at all surprised or taken aback by what had happened. It was just the sort of thing he expected to occur in New York.

“That son of a bitch looked like a fool in that getup,” my father said of the salesman.

“God, he was good-looking,” I said. “They'll probably fire him when he gets older and doesn't look so good.” What I actually was wondering was if he could keep working in this fancy store if he got sick and could not put on his eye makeup, or go to the gym, or mousse his hair to perfection.

My mother's face was red, a shade it rarely showed, redder than when she was moved or furious. Embarrassment brings its own regretful shade. My father looked uncomfortable too, especially after hearing me refer to the haughty man's handsomeness, but said nothing. As I stood with Betty, who was shaking Big George returned for a last look at the fish. We were eager to go, but he was bound and determined to get another look at those fish. They were the only thing on the trip he really enjoyed, and he wasn't going to let anything spoil it. He returned to say that some had come from as far away as Brazil. Someone had told him. Those fish had come all the way from South America and Japan. My father appreciated genuine beauty. I think one of the things he loved most about my mother was that she was never anyone but who she was.

Betty said nothing on the walk back to the hotel; the store windows she had assessed so eagerly no longer seemed to hold much appeal. Her black coat hangs now in the front hall closet, next to Charlotte Hickey's old mink, in a clear plastic garment bag, like a museum piece, a reminder of the injunction she was raised with: “Don't ever think you are anything special.”

That was never her message to me. She was prepared to lose me if my success took me away from her. She would have gladly taken any hurt if it could put me forward.

“Go on,” she always said. “Get out of here. Live your life. Don't worry about us.”

On the Monday morning my parents left New York, I called in to work, said I was sick, and I was; I was almost nauseous, thinking about them leaving, thinking about what might happen to us. I rode with them in a taxi to the airport and stayed with them until their flight was called and they boarded, despite my mother saying I should go on to the office, that my boss was going to be angry. I wanted them to remember me staying, waiting with them until the last minute. I cannot remember how I got back home, but for the rest of the day I was in bed, willing myself to feel nothing, trying to hold back the feelings. My room was dim and I lay there even after it was dark outside and I heard my roommates home from work, not realizing I was there.

In articles now about AIDS, there are always the photos of the crowds, the men in combat boots and T-shirts that say
SILENCE
EQUALS
DEATH
. I believed it. I believed in every act of protest, taking action, every instance of someone standing up, speaking out, and venting their rage. Yet for me those years were not about the silence of repression or cowardice, but other silences: the stillness of the room where I found myself, hiding, hearing Italian words filter through the walls; the quiet of neighborhoods in the Village; the faces of men in the windows of clubs that were often empty; the rooms of apartments hurriedly cleared out, their contents left on the street because no one could quite bear to sort through them. Silence did equal death to me, but not in the way that the protesters meant it. To me it was the silence of empty, the silence that arrives when there are simply no words to cover the situation, the silence of retreat. I wasn't trying to figure out how to live anymore; I was trying to figure out if I would die and how that would work. The silence I heard was what surrounded what could not be expressed, the sound of shutting down because there was only so much we could take in.