Family Dancing (22 page)

The song changes. “Oh, I love this,” Andrew says. He is an enthusiastic and uncontrolled dancer. He twists and jolts, and lunges forward accidentally, nearly colliding with one of the speakers. “Will you be careful?” Nathan shouts, and Andrew jumps back onto the patio. “Relax,” he says. “I’m not going to break anything.”

Celia kicks her legs, pulls her neck back, and gracefully somersaults into the water; suddenly the music is gone, Nathan and Andrew are gone, though she can see their distorted reflections above the pool’s surface. She breathes out a steady stream of bubbles, pulls herself head over heels, and emerges once again, sputtering water. The music pounds. They are still fighting. “Andrew, if you don’t calm down,” Nathan says, “I’m going to turn off the music. I swear.”

“Go to hell,” Andrew says, and Celia takes another dive, this time headfirst, pulling herself deep into the pool’s brightness. She can hear nothing but the sound of the pool cleaning itself—a wet buzz. When she reaches the bottom, she turns around and looks up at the sun refracted through the prisms of the water. She is striped by bars of light. She would stay underwater a long time, but soon she’s feeling that familiar pressure, that near-bursting sensation in her lungs, and she has to push off the bottom, swim back up toward the membrane of the water’s surface. When she breaks through, she gulps air and opens her eyes wide. The music has been turned off, Andrew is gone, and Nathan is sitting on the chaise next to the pool, staring at his knees.

“You were sitting on the bottom of the pool,” he says to Celia.

“What happened? Where’s Andrew?” she asks, wiping the chlorine off her lips.

“He stormed off,” Nathan says. “Nothing unusual.”

“Oh,” Celia says. She looks at her legs, which move like two eels under the water. “I wish I knew what to tell you,” she says.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

Celia keeps her head bowed. Her legs seem to be rippling out of existence, swimming away with the tiny waves.

Celia has spent every free moment, this weekend, in the water. She lusts after Nathan’s tiled swimming pool, and the luminous crystal liquid which inhabits it. In the water, Celia’s body becomes sylphlike, a floating essence, light; she can move with ease, even with grace. On land, she lumbers, her body is heavy and ungainly and must be covered with dark swatches of fabric, with loose skirts and saris. Celia is twenty-three years old, and holds the position of assistant sales director at a publishing company which specializes in legal textbooks. Of course, Nathan and Andrew always encourage her to quit her job and apply for a more creative position somewhere, to move downtown and leave behind her tiny apartment and terrible neighborhood. But Andrew is blessed, and Nathan is rich. They don’t understand that things like that don’t work out so easily for other people.

Here are Andrew and Nathan, as someone who hasn’t known them for very long might see them: blond boy and dark boy, WASP and Jew, easy opposites. They work for rival advertising companies, but work seems to be just about the only thing they don’t fight about. Nathan has dark, pitted skin, curly hair, a face always shadowed by the beginnings of a beard, while Andrew is fine-boned and fair, with a spindly, intelligent nose, and a body which in another century might have been described as “slight.” He likes to say that he belongs in another century, the nineteenth, in the tea-drinking circle of Oscar Wilde; Nathan is invincibly devoted to present-day. They live on opposite poles of Manhattan—Nathan on the Lower East Side, Andrew in an East Ninety-sixth Street tenement on the perilous border of Harlem. From his window, Andrew can see the point where the ground ruptures and the train tracks out of Grand Central emerge into open air. Three blocks down Park Avenue he can see Nathan’s parents’ apartment building. Sometimes he runs into Nathan’s mother at D’Agostino’s, and they chat about the price of tomatoes, and Nathan’s mother, who knows nothing, tells Andrew that he really must come to dinner sometime. Publicly, they are ex-lovers and enemies; privately (but everyone guesses) current lovers and (occasionally) friends. As for Celia, she floats between them, suspended in the strange liquid of her love for them—a love, she likes to think, that dares not speak its name.

That is what they look like to their friends from work, to the people they eat dinner with and sleep with, to all those acquaintances who find them interesting and likeable, but have other concerns in their lives.

And what, Celia wonders now, floating in the pool, is she doing here this weekend, when she has sworn time and again never to travel alone with them anywhere, not even to a restaurant? She always ends up in the middle of their battleground, the giver of approval, the spoils which they fight over, forget, and abandon. She tells herself she is here because it is over a hundred degrees in Manhattan, because her super has confided that the old woman across the hall from her apartment hasn’t opened the door for days, and he’s getting worried. She tells herself she is here because Nathan’s parents are in Bermuda, the maid is on vacation, there is the swimming pool and the garden with fresh basil growing in it. And it’s true, they’ve had a good time. Friday, sticky with Penn Station grime, they walked along the beach, ran in the tide, let the dry, hot wind blow against their faces. Saturday, they went into East Hampton, and looked at all the pretty people on the beach, and Celia decided it really wasn’t all that surprising that those people should be rich and happy, while she was poor and miserable. They ate salad and watched a rerun of “The Love Boat,” and then Nathan and Andrew tucked Celia into Nathan’s parents’ big bed and disappeared together to another part of the house. She closed her eyes and cursed herself for feeling left out, for being alone, for having come out here in the first place. She tried, and failed, to imagine what they looked like making love. She tried to hear them. Now, Sunday morning, they have begun fighting because the fact that they still sleep together is a source of shame to both of them. And why not? Even Celia is ashamed. She is not supposed to know that Nathan and Andrew still sleep together, but Andrew calls her every time it happens. “I don’t even like him,” he tells Celia, his voice hoarse and strained. “But he has this power over me which he has to keep reasserting for the sake of his own ego. Well, no more. I’m not going to give in to him anymore.” But even as he says these words, she can hear his voice grow hesitant with doubt, desire, love.

Celia swims to the pool ladder and hoists herself onto the deck. She has been in the water so long that her hands and feet have wrinkled and whitened. She wraps a towel around herself, suddenly ashamed of how her thighs bounce out of water, lies down on an empty chaise, and picks up a magazine called
Army Slave
from the patio table between her and Nathan. Andrew bought the magazine as a belated birthday present for Nathan, but neither of them has shown much interest in it this weekend. Now Celia thumbs through the pages—a man in green fatigues sitting on a bunk bed, clutching his groin; then a few shots of the man fornicating with another man, in officer’s garb. In the last pages, a third figure shows up, dressed in leather chaps, and looks on from the sidelines. “Do you like it?” Nathan asks. “Does it turn you on?”

“I don’t understand what’s so erotic about army bases and locker rooms,” Celia says. “I mean, I suppose I understand that these are very male places. But still, they’re very anti-gay places. I mean, do you find this erotic? Did you find locker rooms erotic when you were growing up? And this guy in the leather—”

Nathan thrusts out his hips and purses his lips. “Oh, don’t let’s talk about whips and leather. Let’s talk about Joan Crawford!” He makes little kissing gestures at Celia.

“Be serious,” Celia says. “I was wondering because I want to know, to understand, genuinely.”

“From a sociological perspective?” Nathan asks, returning to a normal posture.

“You could call it that,” Celia says.

“I’ll tell you this,” Nathan says. “When draft registration was reintroduced, I saw a magazine with a picture on the cover of it of this very big hairy guy in a torn-up army uniform, staring out at you very lewdly. And underneath him it said, ‘The Gay Community salutes the return of the military draft. ’ It was really very funny.”

Celia’s eyes light up. “Oh, that’s great!” she says. “That’s reclamation!”

Nathan doesn’t respond, so she returns to the magazine. She picks up a pencil from the table and starts to scribble something in the margin when Andrew appears, seemingly from nowhere, before her and Nathan. “I’m mad,” he says. “But I’m not going to play your stupid game and just run away and hide out and sulk. I want to face things.”

“Andrew,” Nathan says, “explain to Celia why that magazine is a turn-on. Note I do not use the word ‘erotic.’
”

“Oh, Christ, Celia,” Andrew says, “I can’t talk about that with you.”

“I should’ve figured you’d be prudish about things like this when I found out you slept in pajamas,” Celia says.

“Andrew doesn’t want to spoil the integrity of his double life,” Nathan says. “He doesn’t want you to know that though by day he is your average preppie fashion-conscious fag, by night he goes wild—leather, cowboy hats, water sports. You name it, he’s into it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Andrew says. “You’re the one with the double life.” He glances significantly at the pool.

“This isn’t sociology. This isn’t objective curiosity,” Celia says. “You should know that by now.”

They both look at her, puzzled. She closes her eyes. The sun beats down, and Celia imagines that the temperature has risen ten degrees in the last ten minutes. She opens her eyes again. Andrew has sat down on the end of Nathan’s chaise and is berating him.

In a single, swift lunge, Celia pulls herself up and hurls herself into the water.

Celia, Nathan, and Andrew have known each other since their freshman year in college, when they were all in the same introductory English class. For most of that year, however, Nathan and Andrew recognized each other only as “Celia’s other friend”; they had no relationship themselves. She recalls the slight nausea she experienced the day when she learned Nathan was gay. Up until that point, she had never known a homosexual, and she felt ashamed for having liked him, shyly as she did, so shyly that she phrased her feelings like that: “I like him,” she confided to her roommate, who played varsity hockey. Celia felt ashamed as well for not having known better, and she feared her naïve affection might seem like an insult to Nathan, and turn him against her. Nathan was something new to Celia; she idolized him because he had suffered for being different, and because his difference gave him access to whole realms of experience she knew nothing of. Celia had never had many friends in school, had never been terribly popular, and this had always seemed just to her: She was fat and shy, and she was constantly being reprimanded for being fat and shy. She never considered that she might be “different” in the intense, romantic way Nathan was. She was simply alone, and where Nathan’s aloneness was something that ennobled him, hers was something to regret.

At first, Nathan accepted Celia’s gestures of affection toward him because she would listen—endlessly, it seemed—and talk to him, respond, as well. She was fascinated by the stories that he told her so willingly, stories about mysterious sexual encounters in men’s rooms, adolescent fumblings in changing rooms. Her curiosity grew; she read every book and article she could find on the subject of homosexuality, including explicit diaries of nights spent cruising the docks and beaches, the bars and bathhouses of New York and L.A. and Paris. She read all of Oscar Wilde, and most of Hart Crane. She started to speak up more, to interrupt in class, and found in her underused vocal cords her mother’s powerful, Bronx-born timbre, capable of instantly bringing crowds to attention. At their college, it was quite common for women in certain majors—women with long hair and purple clothes and a tendency to talk loudly and quickly and a lot—to spend most of their time in the company of gay men. Celia became the prime example of this accepted social role, so much so that some people started referring to her as the “litmus paper test,” and joking that one had only to introduce her to a man to determine his sexual preference. It was not a kind nickname, implying that somehow she drove them to it, but Celia bore it stoically, and worse nicknames as well. She joked that she was the forerunner of a new breed of women who emitted a strange pheromone which turned men gay, and would eventually lead to the end of the human race. All the time she believed herself to be better off for the company she kept. What Celia loved in her gay friends was their willingness to commit themselves to endless analytical talking. Over dinner, over coffee, late at night, they talked and talked, about their friends, their families, about books and movies, about “embodying sexual difference,” and always being able to recognize people in the closet. This willingness to talk was something no man Celia had ever known seemed to possess, and she valued it fiercely. Indeed, she could go on forever, all night, and invariably it would be Nathan who would finally drag himself off her flabby sofa and say, “Excuse me, Celia, it’s four a.m. I’ve got to get to bed.” After he left, she would lie awake for hours, unable to cease in her own mind the conversation which had finally exhausted him.

As their friendship intensified, she wanted still to probe more deeply, to learn more about Nathan. She knew that he (and, later, Andrew) had a whole life which had nothing, could have nothing to do with her—a life she heard about only occasionally, when she was brave enough to ask (the subject embarrassed Nathan). This life took place primarily in bars—mysterious bastions of maleness which she imagined as being filled with yellow light creeping around dark corners, cigarettes with long fingers of ash always about to crumble, and behind every door, more lewdness, more sexuality, until finally, in her imagination, there was a last door, and behind it—here she drew a blank. She did not know. Of course Nathan scoffed at her when she begged him to take her to a bar. “They’re boring, Celia, totally banal,” he said. “You’d be disappointed the same way I was.” They were just out of college, and Nathan was easily bored by most things.