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Authors: Joe Keenan

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BOOK: Blue Heaven
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We stumbled out onto Columbus Avenue, our hearts as high as our bill, and marched jubilantly uptown singing show tunes full voice, as happily blind to the future as we were to crosstown traffic.

Given my impetuous headlong stride and a tendency to close my eyes while sustaining high notes it was a miracle that I wasn't hit by a speeding taxi. Indeed, in light of what followed it was not only a miracle. It was a shame.

 

 

Four

 

I
'm not usually susceptible to hangovers. On the other hand, I'm not immune to them either. Although the Hangover Fairy is fairly indulgent of my occasional excesses and given to sparing the rod, this is not the case in instances of brazen provocation. On the morning following our celebration at the Jaded Palate, any doubt I might have had as to whether or not a combination of burgundy, scotch, tequila, triple sec and champagne constitutes brazen provocation was swiftly erased. I lay in bed till noon listening to the bloodcurdling screams of the pigeons on my fire escape, the relentless timpani of my pulse and a somewhat softer popping sound. Probably my cells dividing.

Gilbert and Moira, whatever their own agonies that morning, wasted no time in getting the nuptial ball rolling. Gilbert left his West Ninety-third Street shoebox and moved into God's Country.

God's Country is the name by which Moira's friends, associates and victims refer to her apartment. Located on Central Park West and Eighty-third, it boasts four bedrooms, five baths, a dining room, a study, a laundry and a living room the size of a small prairie. It's owned by a dear old thing named Gloria Conkridge whose husband died some years ago and, as Moira puts it, "left her a little patent on something"; blood, one suspects. Gloria now resides in Palm Beach but maintains the apartment as a sort of museum to house all the memorabilia accumulated during her glory days as a New York society hostess. She visits once a year in the spring, staying for just one week of extravagant party-giving before staggering back to Florida and a rejuvenating regimen of sheep glands, grapefruit and gigolos.

Moira, in a deal of the sort only she can finagle, lives there rent-free the rest of the year. All she has to do in exchange is keep the
mementos dusted and tend lovingly to Gloria's menagerie of forty pet dogs, cats and birds. Lest you leap to the conclusion that, by agreeing to care for these animals, Moira has taken on anything vaguely akin to a job, let me point out that they're all quite dead and stuffed by a taxidermist, who, judging from the eerily realistic poses he's captured, really knew his sawdust.

However questionable one might find Mrs. C's taste in hanging on so tenaciously to her departed chums, she at least had the decorum to keep them out of view in a little shrine behind the kitchen. Moira, in contrast, finds it amusing to pose them in various nooks where guests can come across them unexpectedly. The effect is not pleasing. The whole place looks like some awful Hammer Studios film, the finale of which would have them all springing to demonic life and devouring the promiscuous baby-sitter.

Gilbert, however, was not the least put off by this macabre touch in the decorating scheme. So thrilled was he by the improvement spacewise over his previous quarters he wouldn't have cared if Moira had filled the bedrooms with wax replicas of the Manson family. And not only did he now have ten times as much room to kick around in, but a nice little income as well. He'd sublet his own studio, for which he'd been paying $325, for a larcenous $800. Moira naturally insisted on half of his profit and Gilbert, by telling her he was only getting $450, managed to clear $412.50 a month.

 

I didn't see much of them for the next week or so. Holly Batterman had spread the word with his usual efficiency, as a result of which they were besieged with invitations from friends eager to see the romance for themselves and pass judgment on its authenticity.

My only conversation with them that first week occurred in Zabar's. I collided with them at the cheese counter where they were purchasing something green-flecked and ghastly to take to a dinner party at the playwright Marlowe Heppenstall's Barrow Street lair. They apologized for not having called, but things had been "justyouknowinsane."

They said they'd been out to Long Island for a fabulous dinner with Maddie and Tony Cellini, both of whom were charmed by their daughter-in-law to be. The Cellinis had also received a warm letter from the duchess. Her Grace had expressed once more her entirely baffling delight over the marriage, and invited them all to dine with her at the Pierre the night of her arrival.

My own chores as third member of the syndicate had begun the day after our celebration, the very moment I'd felt well enough to place the phone back on the hook. I received that day alone eleven phone calls from people who'd spoken to Holly and were, like him, eager to know who the lucky girl was. I can tell you with some authority that there are few worse fates that can befall a hungover eardrum than to have the words
"You're kidding!"
screamed into it by eleven homosexuals in the course of one afternoon.

The calls continued unabated for the rest of the week, by which point they were mostly repeats from people who'd seen Gilbert and Moira with their own eyes but remained skeptical. Many thought Gilbert was merely trying to attract attention by becoming engaged to a woman-and not just any woman either but the most spectacularly unlikely one he could find. Others maintained it was all a hoax he had devised for the sheer fun of pulling everyone's leg, as had been the case back in 1980 when for two months he had many of us convinced he was pining away for a handsome former lover who was one of the American hostages in Iran. I did my best to persuade one and all that I myself thought he was dead serious and that theirs would be a marriage of true minds, but these assertions fell on deaf ears. Many just assumed, correctly, that I was in on it.

My task wasn't made any easier by Gilbert's insistence on maintaining that his conversion to heterosexuality was exclusive and permanent. I told him that to say this was to place more of a strain on the credulity of his friends than was either desirable or necessary. There's a limit to what people will believe and, while small adaptations of one sort or another are common, complete overnight transformations are not. You'll believe that the lion will lie down with the lamb. You may even accept that they liked it so well they're considering a permanent arrangement. But if you're told the lamb now gets up every morning and kills a zebra for breakfast, you know you're being teased.

I made this argument to Gilbert, but he remained intransigent.

"No! I'm sorry, but no."

"Why not? Why can't you just tell people you've become bisexual?"

"Because I've already told them I've gone straight-that I doubt I was really ever gay to begin with."

"Oh, honey!"

"Well, that's what I've said. And you don't start out with one story then change it all around. It destroys your credibility."

"But I've told everyone and
no one
believes it!"

A pensive silence fell.

"What are they saying?"

"Well ... for one thing they all bring up your past affairs. Face it, Gilbert, you haven't exactly been the soul of discretion."

He couldn't argue with that. I've known a number of people who've held the belief that love is merely a game, but Gilbert's the only man I know who seems to view it as a spectator sport. Do you remember that Paul Simon song from some years back, the one in which he stated that there are fifty ways to leave your lover? Well, to Gilbert there's only one: bring him to the largest party you can find, down seven scotches in an hour while growing increasingly maudlin, wait for a lull in the noise level, then hurl your drink in his face shouting, "It's finished, you hear me!
Finished!"
People will approach you and ask what's wrong. Tell them.

"Let's not forget," I said, "that you've had three affairs and three breakups in the last year alone.
No one
fails to mention this. What am I supposed to say?"

"Tell them it proves I'm straight! My affairs never, lasted because I needed something I could only get from a woman."

"From
Moira?
Why can't we agree to say you're bisexual! You know they'll believe that."

"Of course they will," he said testily. "That's because being bisexual isn't a change at all. It's a phase. Honestly, you're so thick sometimes! Think - how many people have we known who've at one point or another decided they were suddenly bisexual?"

I considered it a moment and found to my surprise that I could immediately think of four. Gilbert pressed on.

"Blair Monroe did. So did Andy Pommerantz. Briefly! It happens all the time. Some silly queen has one little fling with a woman and decides he's now an official bisexual. Then he drives everyone up the wall talking about how much
richer
his life is now that he's one of the sensitive few who refuse to confine their love to just half the human race. 'Straight men just love women, gay men just love men but
I
love
everybody,
nyah, nyah, nyah!' And it always blows over! Six weeks later you run into him and he's with some cute guy and you say, 'So! How's
Lisa?
and he just wants to
kill
you!"

"Okay, so people may think it's only a phase. What's the differ-

"The gifts, Philip! The gifts! Look at this from their perspective. You're going to a wedding and you're convinced the marriage is going to last as long as a Radio Shack battery-how much are you going to spend? Huh?"

"Don't you think you're taking this just a bit far?"

"No. Whatever anyone says you just keep insisting I'm really and truly straight. I was never gay, I was trendy. Okay? Stick to your guns!"

"They're your guns, Gilbert."

"Whosever. Just stick to 'em and sooner or later people will start to buy it."

 

People, however, did not.

At least not until mid-November when Gilbert and Moira, annoyed by my reports of widespread skepticism, took matters into their own hands.

Nancy Malone, an actress friend of ours, had recently won the uncoveted role of Marie Curie in Marlowe Heppenstall's musical bio,
Eureka, Baby!
Word had it that the show was off-Broadway's answer to Valium, but Nancy's a friend so we accepted her invitation to attend the opening and subsequent obsequies. Gilbert, of course, took Moira, who has long been a pal of the perpetrator's. (During her brief career as an actress she appeared in his short-lived musicalization of
The Bell Jar.)
I asked my friend and collaborator, the composer Claire Simmons. Claire has shared my warm feelings for Marlowe ever since our days with him in the BMI songwriter's workshop, where our candid critique of his
Bell Jar
musical
(Bong!)
led him to retaliate by demolishing everything we wrote for the next two years.

Following the show our foursome nipped down the street to Vanessa's and had a good giggle reviewing the low spots of the show. Even Moira joined in on our effort to find still more rhymes for radium than Marlowe had employed in the show's rousing finale. Our mood throughout was highly convivial.

So it surprised Claire and me to notice, soon after we'd arrived at the cast party, that Gilbert and Moira were engaged in some strange silent row.

"What's with those two?" hissed the ubiquitous Holly Batterman.

He motioned toward the other end of the room where Gilbert and Moira stood about six feet apart glaring at each other.

"You got me, Holly," I said. "I don't know a thing about it."

"Oh, sure, Blanche! Just like you didn't know he was getting married-then that very night you had drinks with him at the Riviera before going uptown to meet Moira and Vulpina at the Jaded Palate for margaritas and Veuve Clicquot!"

There are moments, I confess, when 1 worry what would happen if Holly ever decided to work for the Soviets.

"Holly, believe us," said Claire. "They were laughing and joking not-"

She stopped short. Holly was staring raptly over our shoulders. We turned to see that Gilbert and Moira were now standing close together. Gilbert, his face red with anger, was holding Moira's wrists in a tight grip, whispering what did not appear to be sweet nothings into her ear. Moira, whose features at the moment called to mind those of a kabuki lion, hissed something into his ear, bit the lobe, threw scotch on it, and fled the room.

Many of those present had seen this and those that missed it soon saw Holly's vividly mimed reenactment. From then on there was only one topic of conversation on everyone's lips: the Fate of the Marriage. The joyous pair refused to discuss it at all. I asked Gilbert myself but he only promised to talk at a more opportune moment.

Normally, of course, I'd have dragged him into the bathroom and pummeled it out of him if I'd had to, but my energies that night were focused on the show's costume designer, a strapping youth with broad shoulders and a habit of sucking ice cubes provocatively. However eager I was to get the scoop on the sudden rift I was more determined still not to leave this lad's side till I was sure at least one of us would wake up the next morning wondering where the hell he was.

But while I was learning more about bustles than the average boy wants to know, things on the battlefront were getting stranger and stranger. Moira, who hadn't cried in public since her baptism, suddenly burst into tears and ran sobbing from the room. About midnight I glanced into one of the bedrooms and saw her sitting on the edge of the bed with Claire. She was sobbing quietly with her head on Claire's shoulder and Claire was murmuring "There there"s, looking sympathetic and utterly confused. Claire later joined me and Edith Head for a bit and we asked what she'd managed to learn.

"Not much, I'm afraid. She said it was too painful to talk about, she just wanted to be held. Then she kept crying and saying what a
fool she'd been. I don't know what happened but I've never seen Moira so upset. I feel awful for her."

BOOK: Blue Heaven
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