Buddies (18 page)

“No Hugh Whitkin for you!” snapped Dennis Savage. “He’s a jaded son-of-a-bitch who’ll chew you, spit you out, and still have time for a lunchtime quickie with the mailroom boys.”

“Look, I’m not exactly a novice—”

“No Hugh Whitkin or no party!” Dennis Savage walked to the phone, opened his address book, and laid his hand on the receiver. “I can set you up a party at Hugh Whitkin’s or I can forget about the whole thing. It’s your choice.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Carlo has been around the block, after all. I don’t care how lurid Hugh Whitkin is, you can’t throw a lion to the lions.”

Dennis Savage slowly shook his head. “Choose, Carlo!”

Carlo chose. “No Hugh Whitkin.”

“Attaboy.”

But when Dennis Savage turned to dial, Carlo winked at me.

*   *   *

I should say something about Hugh Whitkin, though it grates me even to introduce much less develop him. He would make a dandy villain on the soaps: the smooth cad who will woo you till you grow to need him—at which time he tells you you’re a dead issue. If Carlo is the gay brimming with romance, Hugh Whitkin holds as much romance as a colander. He is everything I despise in gay, closeted, selfish rich, politically resistant, and classy without culture. There was a time some years back when I moved with a nobby crowd. We were conservative in that old-fashioned, anglophile, James Burnham way, and dressed up when we socialized, and disdained a good many things. Eventually I realized that a conservative gay is about as valid as a Jewish Nazi, and Hugh Whitkin—the maximum leader of this crowd—was the main reason why.

I broke with my friends not so much for political reasons as for psychosexual ones. What did they think of themselves? What did they believe they knew of the world? What kind of men did they like? Little. Everything. Wimps, like themselves. You can’t lead a successful life thinking you don’t deserve one, or voicing preferences for the good old days of the men’s rooms and the vice cops, or referring to the annual marching festival as Gay Shame Day. The first time I heard one of the crowd lament “the lost glamour of the tea-room rendezvous” my mouth fell open, and I disgraced myself passing heavy commentary at Harry Apgar when he brayed that line about “the love that dare not speak its name” becoming “the love that wouldn’t shut up.” Then, on a Gay Pride Day, when Hugh Whitkin smirked about “gay shame” I held very still—maybe I’d heard him wrong. But no: he smiled at me, daring me to challenge him; I think he knew I hated him before I knew it. I thought about it for a long while, as the others stirred about me and I refused to move out of the way of whatever was going on and everybody got the idea that I was going to do something horrible.

I didn’t. I left and took a long walk home to think about it, and finally realized that I had been keeping company with men who embodied the straight’s comprehension of gay: self-hating, devious, dreary pixies, as fearful of sensuality as hungry for it and terrified of women who aren’t terrified of men. Solidarity of kind, to them, meant not comradely support but cold bodies to fit around the brunch table: a guest list for glum amusement between work and sleep.

The more I thought about the company I’d been keeping the angrier I got, till I was storming home promising myself never to see any of them again—and not to waste any words explaining myself, either. I was resolute. But I feared I’d suffer a bad case of
pensées de l’escalier
—going over and over what I should have said when I had the chance—if I didn’t confront one of them. And I knew which one.

I called Hugh and told him I wanted to see him. The sooner the better. Maybe now. He laughed. “Everyone’s worried about you, the way you hurried off. But I’m not worried, my friend.” He laughed again. “I never worry because I have nothing to worry about.”

Carlo is right in assuming that lawyers have terraces, and Hugh’s is spectacular, a wraparound overlooking the East River. Chivas in hand, we went outside, Hugh sardonically smiling, as if he knew exactly what I was going to say and was ready to trip me up.

I began, “I’m going to tell you straight out—”

“What’s that line from Oscar Wilde,” he interjected, “about being absolutely candid when you have something unpleasant to say?”

I tried smiling sardonically back at him, but my sardonic lacks something in crust.

“Please go on,” he said.

“I’m here to tell you what I think of you.”

“My dear fellow, why on earth would I care what you think of me?”

That’s a great comeback, boys and girls: no matter what the other says in reply, he comes off a fool. While I regrouped to renew my assault, Hugh moved closer to me, touched my arm, and said, “Have you ever made love to someone you loathed?”

Startled silent, I tried to overwhelm him with a bold cool, and stared into his eyes. But you can’t stare down a man as handsome as Hugh Whitkin; you can only stare at him.

“You’re on the wrong side,” he told me. “You’re going to be, the way you’re headed. Leather jackets and mustaches and those circus-freak rags in the back pocket. Is that how you fancy yourself? Walking around like a human commercial for debauchery?”

I should have realized that you can’t win an argument with a lawyer. I wasn’t even able to start one.

“You’re a smart fellow,” he went on, his voice low. “Reason it out. You’re not some pouf roughneck from Scranton. You’re one of us.” Smiling, because he never worries. “You’re going to be miserable if you join up with the wrong crowd.” He touched me again. “Don’t you realize that no one in America cares whether or not you’re quietly homosexual? It’s the gay stuff they hate, that’s all. This public flogging of their feelings. You think the men upstairs are going to allow this filth to hector them indefinitely?”

He was stroking my hair, mesmerizing me. I was letting him. It came out a whisper when I said, “I hate you.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t even wish you could.”

“I’m not one of you.”

He touched my tie, the handkerchief peeping out of my blazer pocket, the stripes in my Brooks Brothers shirt, as if taking inventory of my worth. “Linka Oelrichs remembers you from Friends Academy. She says you were in
The Boy Friend
together.”

“She was thrown out in her senior year for rimming Phoebe Wadsworth in the common room without a permission slip.”

“Linka Oelrichs heads the
Times’
Vienna bureau. Her brother Colbert is going to be the junior senator from Connecticut when the time comes. The family has been running their share of the Northeast for four generations.”

“Cole Oelrichs is a bloody fucking crap-headed dildo and so are you,” I said, but I had my hands on him then, pulling his jacket off his shoulders, remembering what I went through as a seventh-grader, five hundred miles from home and trying to fit in with the likes of Cole and Linka Oelrichs and various apprentice Hugh Whitkins, a pouf roughneck from, as it happens, not Scranton but Wilkes-Barre, one town over, and I suppose if I had given Hugh a beating I would have gone home feeling better but then I would never have known what it’s like to screw the most elegant man on the east side.

Of course his theme, so to say, was that I
was
one of them, that I took him kind for kind, affirming that his patrician breeding and antique fortune were decorations as essential to the correct life as were the strains of orange and brown in his golden hair. But more: as he had never shown the slightest interest in me physically, alluring me and allowing me to be allured
and
to act on it was a lovely slur, a derogation fit for the blue book. At least I gave it to him gutter-style, standing in his bedroom, with our shoes on and pants down. And when I was about to leave I said, “To answer your question: Yes, I have made love to someone I loathed. Just now.”

He was sitting on the bed, pulling off his shoes, and he laughed as I walked out. He laughed because he has nothing to worry about.

*   *   *

Even eight years later, I wasn’t sure how glad Hugh would be to throw a party for a man he’d never met, a particularly gay man at that, and a distinctly unpatrician gay man, but for all Hugh’s Us and Them he’s probably as curious about what the other side is like sexually as the rest of us are.

I asked Dennis Savage if Hugh had remarked about my participation in all this.

“He said he’s looking forward to seeing you again.”

“Did he say…?” I caught myself just in time; Dennis Savage was watching me as Aschenbach watched Tadzio. No—as the hotel manager watched Aschenbach watching Tadzio.

“Is there something you haven’t told me?” said Dennis Savage. “About you and Hugh Whitkin?”

“Of course,” I replied.

It was the night of the party; we were dressing Carlo out of my closet. As someone who has lived his entire life on a wardrobe of T-shirts and corduroys (Carlo’s trademark; supposedly he has never worn a pair of jeans since he came to New York), Carlo was naturally as dazzled by the accoutrements of the dress-up life as Poles, Greeks, and Norwegians were said to be by the stupas of Manhattan as their emigrant boats pulled into port.

“Look at these!” he cried, seizing my little clock cuff links, heirlooms I never wear. “Earrings that tell time!”

“Don’t you ever buy new clothes?” Dennis Savage fussed, pawing through my shirts. “You must have gone through high school in these.”

“I want a striped tie, okay?” said Carlo. “And perhaps I may have been wondering if I should change my name.”

Dennis Savage carefully looked at him.

“Well, they’re all going to be Ellis and Terence and Perry, right?” Carlo continued. “Maybe I should seem like one of them.”

“Maybe they’re as tired of their scene as you are of yours,” I ventured. “So, like, opposites attract.”

“Yes, okay. It’s just … I do believe I thought of a name I might use. A party name, as you truly might say.”

Dennis Savage, straightening Carlo’s tie, said, “I don’t like it already.”

“Say, Coco,” I advised Dennis Savage. “Why don’t you concentrate on designing the outfit and—”

“
What … name …
did you think up?”

Carlo chuckled at him and patted his shoulder. “Whitkin McHugh?”

Dennis Savage slammed the closet door.

“I just thought—”

“We had a deal! No Hugh Whitkin! No thinking about or impersonating Hugh Whitkin!”

“Oh, gee.”

“I
knew
he’d pull this!”

I took Carlo over to the mirror so he could see himself. He looked terrific as always, and a little different—wiser, maybe—and he saw it and grinned.

“Look,” he said.

Then we collected Little Kiwi, bundled into a cab, and rolled up to East End Avenue to Hugh Whitkin’s party, a soap-opera casting director’s dream: two dozen men only a woman could love, cute but not sexy. Still, after a career of men called Slim and Blue, this was what Carlo wanted. It was quite some do, with catered food, a bartender, and a waiter. Little Kiwi had his first Perrier and sat upside down on the sofa, Dennis Savage performed fraternity nostalgia with Hugh, and I helped Carlo circulate.

Smooth, boys and girls. But Hugh always is smooth. He greeted me at the door like a dear friend welcoming me back from having been lost for two years in The Cloisters. Somehow he seemed backlit, as if Greta Garbo had lent him William Daniels, and, of course, the debonair flurry beyond the entryway was impressive, with the most delicate chamber music on the processed tape and the most admirable hors d’oeuvres on the passing trays. “Guess I won’t need this,” Little Kiwi whispered to me, showing me the box of Raisinets he had slipped into his breast pocket.

Yes, smooth; still, I don’t like these parties. I prefer the lit gatherings—tense, yes, but brilliant. This lawyer crowd could talk (1) mortgages, (2) Wall Street, and (3) shop. Someone with prep-school tact led me to an alleged fellow opera buff who turned out to have seen only three operas, all of them
La Bohème.
As my favorites are
Les Troyens, Les Huguenots,
and
Francesca da Rimini,
we had little to share.

Carlo was a wow. He was too intent on finding his fate to be shy and too thrilled with the
richesse
of archetype to worry about how he appealed to them. Yet as he charmed them they were unsure how to charm back. “Where do you play squash?” one lawyer asked Carlo.

Imagine.

After squiring Carlo through the ranks, I went over to Little Kiwi and dished the gang with him. He hasn’t much to say but at least it’s a familiar mouth. Dennis Savage joined us and we watched the circles form, close, and reform around Carlo. Whatever buildup Hugh had given him to assemble his crew, Carlo was living up to it. Hugh thought so, too. Slowly he turned, step by step, inch by inch. When Dennis Savage and I got to them, Carlo was merrily enlarging on his San Francisco past to an audience so enraptured they were dribbling scampi onto their vests.

“Cockdudes?” Hugh was saying. “Cuddleboys?”

“Yeah, see, the cockdudes would spread out these mattresses,” Carlo was telling them, “and they’d go out on the street to round up some cuddleboys,” as he shifted his focus to Hugh, “and then…” because Hugh had taken Carlo’s hand in his own, “you see…” and they locked eyes and somewhere great bells went clang.

Hugh took Carlo’s other hand. “Yes?”

“They lay the cuddleboys on the mattresses.”

“Ah.”

“And they…”

“Tell me.”

“… they…”

“Yes.”

Carlo grasped Hugh’s shoulders. “This is a nice party.”

“What do cockdudes do to cuddleboys?”

“I’m not allowed to talk to you.”

“No one is.”

“They loosen the cuddleboys up. Cream them up.”

“Do they, now?”

“You’re so handsome.”

The other lawyers had drifted away; one thing a lawyer knows is timing. Carlo and Hugh kissed as Dennis Savage shook his head. “Get your coat,” he told me.

*   *   *

Dennis Savage refused to discuss it; not a word. Of course Carlo had gone for Hugh. It was not blond hair after dark that he wanted, nor innocence after experience. He wanted mean after pleasant—or so I guess. Carlo had known hot without menace, fun without substance. Every other day he would tell me, “I’ve just fallen in love,” but once, in one of those profound confessional sessions he abhors but gives so much to, he told me he had very seldom been in love in any real sense. “Very seldom,” he had insisted. But was this love? In his several months with Hugh, Carlo’s chest sprouted hair, his head whispered gray, and his stomach, so slightly, began to sag. He aged.