Family Dancing (23 page)

A few weeks later Andrew arrived in the city. The night he got in he and Celia went to the Village for dinner, and as they walked down Greenwich Avenue she watched his eyes grow wide, and his head turn, as they passed through the cluster of leather-jacketed men sporting together in front of Uncle Charlie’s. The next night he asked Celia to accompany him to another bar he was scared to go to alone (he’d never actually been to a gay bar), and she jumped at the opportunity. At the steel doors of the bar, which was located on a downtown side street, the bouncer looked her over and put out his arm to bar their entrance. “Sorry,” he said, “no women allowed”—pronouncing each syllable with dental precision, as if she were a child or a foreigner, someone who barely understood English. No women: There was the lure of the unknown, the unknowable. She could catch riffs of disco music from inside, and whiffs of a strange fragrance, like dirty socks, but slightly sweet. Here she was at the threshold of the world of the men she loved, and she was not being allowed in, because that world would fall apart, its whole structure of exclusive fantasy would be disrupted if she walked into it. “No women,” the bouncer said again, as if she hadn’t heard him. “It’s nothing personal, it’s just policy.”

“When all the men you love can only love each other,” Celia would later tell people—a lot of people—“you can’t help but begin to wonder if there’s something wrong with being a woman. Even if it goes against every principle you hold, you can’t help but wonder.” That night she stood before those closed steel doors and shut her eyes and wished, the way a small child wishes, that she could be freed from her loose skirts, her make-up and jewels, her interfering breasts and buttocks. If she could only be stripped and pared, made sleek and svelte like Nathan and Andrew, then she might slip between those doors as easily as the men who hurried past her that night, their hands in their pockets; she might be freed of the rank and untrustworthy baggage of femininity. But all she could do was turn away. Andrew remained near the door. “Well,” he said. “Well, what?” Celia asked. “Would you mind terribly much if I went in myself, anyway?” he asked. She saw in his eyes that desperate, hounded look she recognized from the times they’d walked together, and passed good-looking men in the streets; that look she realized was probably on her face tonight as well. There was something behind those doors which was stronger than his love for her, much stronger. She didn’t say anything, but walked away into the street, vowing never to go downtown again. On the subway, riding home, she watched a bag lady endlessly and meticulously rearrange her few possessions, and she decided that she would become bitter and ironic, and talk about herself in witticisms, and live alone always. “For most young women,” she decided she’d say, “falling in love with a gay man was a rite of passage. For me it became a career.” Then she would take a puff—no, a drag—from her cigarette (she would of course have taken up smoking). And laugh. And toss it off.

Celia has made Andrew and Nathan eggs, and garnished each plate with a sprig of watercress and a little tuft of alfalfa sprouts. Now, balancing the plates on her arm, she walks toward the library, where they’ve retreated from the sun for the afternoon. When she enters the library, she sees Andrew leaning against the windowsill, and Nathan lying with his legs slung over the leather sofa, his head resting on the floor.

“Lunch,” Celia says.

“Sundays are always horrible,” Andrew says. “No matter what. Especially Sundays in summer.”

Nathan does a backflip off the sofa, and makes a loud groaning noise. “Such depression!” he says. “What to do, what to do. We could go tea dancing! That’s a lovely little Sunday afternoon tradition at the River Club. Thumping disco, live erotic dancers .
.
.”

“I’m not going back to the city one more minute before I have to,” Celia says.

“Yes,” Andrew says. “I’m sure Celia would just love it if we went off tea dancing.”

Celia looks at him.

“I’m surprised at you, Andrew,” Nathan says. “You usually enjoy dancing tremendously. You usually seem to have a really euphoric time dancing.”

“Enough, Nathan,” Andrew says.

“Yes, watching Andrew dance is like—it’s like—how to describe it? I think we see in Andrew’s dancing the complete realization of the mind-body dualism.”

He stands up, walks around the sofa, and hoists himself over its back, resuming his upside-down position. “The body in abandon,” Nathan continues. “Total unself-consciousness. Nothing which has anything to do with thought.”

Celia gives Nathan a glance of disapproval. It is unnecessary; Andrew is on the defensive himself today. “I find your hypocrisy laughable,” he says. “One minute you’re telling me, ‘Why don’t you just stop analyzing everything to death?’ and the next you’re accusing me of not thinking. Get your attacks straight, Nathan.”

“Ah,” Nathan says, lifting up his head and cocking it (as best he can) at Andrew, “but I’m not criticizing your dancing, Andrew! I’m just extrapolating! Can you imagine what it would be like to never, ever think, really? I think it would be wonderful! You’d just sort of trip along, not particularly enjoying yourself but never having a bad time, either! Never feeling anguish or jealousy—too complicated, too tiring. I know people who are really like that. You see, Celia, Andrew thinks I’m dishonest. He thinks I run scared from the full implications of my sexual choice. He would like my friends, the Peters. Lovers, Celia. They’re both named Peter, and they live together, but they’re completely promiscuous, and if one has an affair, the other isn’t bothered. Peter just has to tell Peter all about it and it’s as if Peter’s had the affair, too. But they’re happy. They’ve fully integrated their gayness into their lives. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do, Andrew?”

He hoists himself up, and sits down again on the sofa, this time normally.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Andrew says. “People like that aren’t even people.”

Celia, sitting cross-legged on the floor, has finished her eggs. Now she reaches for Nathan’s plate and picks the watercress off it. Nathan has eaten only a few spoonfuls. At restaurants, Celia often finds herself picking food off other people’s plates, completely unintentionally, as if she’s lost control over her eating.

Nathan, his head right side up, is humming the tune to the Pete Seeger song “Little Boxes.” Now he glances up at Celia. “Shall we sing, my dear?” he asks.

“You can,” she says. “I don’t ever want to sing that song again.”

Nathan sings:

“Little faggots in the Village,

And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky,

Yes, they’re all made out of ticky-tacky,

And they all look just the same.

There’s a cowboy and a soldier and a UCLA wrest-i-ler,

And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky,

And they all look just the same.”

Andrew bursts out laughing. “That’s funny,” he says. “When did you make that up?”

“
I
made it up,” Celia says. “Walking down the street one night.” She smiles, rather bitterly, remembering the evening they walked arm in arm, very drunk, past Uncle Charlie’s Downtown and sang that song. Nathan suddenly became very self-conscious, very guilty, and pulled away from Celia. He had a sudden horror of being mistaken for half of a heterosexual couple, particularly here, in front of his favorite bar. “Just remember,” he had said to Celia. “I’m not your boyfriend.”

“Why do I even speak to you?” Celia had answered. It was right after Andrew had abandoned her outside that other bar. That summer Andrew and Nathan, singly and collectively, stood her up at least fourteen times; twice Nathan, who was living at his parents’ place, asked to use her apartment to meet people and she let him. She didn’t think she was worth more than that. She was fat, and she was a litmus test. The only men she cared about were gay, and she didn’t seem to know many women. She was Typhoid Celia. But finally she got angry, one Sunday, when she was at Jones Beach with Andrew. “Answer me this,” she said to him, as they settled down on that stretch of the beach which is the nearly exclusive domain of Puerto Rican families. Andrew wasn’t even looking at her; he couldn’t keep his head from pulling to the left, straining to catch a glimpse of the gay part of the beach, where Celia had refused to sit. “Answer me this,” Celia said again, forcing him to look at her. “A nice hypothetical question along the lines of, would you rather be blind or deaf? Why is it that no matter how much you love your friends, the mere possibility of a one-night stand with someone you probably won’t ever see again is enough to make you stand them up, lock them out, pretend they don’t exist when you pass them in the street? Why do we always so willingly give up a beloved friend for any lover?”

Even now she could see Andrew’s head drifting just slightly to the left. Then he looked at her, pointed a finger at her face, and said, “There’s a tea leaf lodged between your front teeth.”

Celia doesn’t realize until she’s doing it that she is eating the last of the alfalfa sprouts off Andrew’s plate. In horror, she throws them down. She slaps her hand and swears she won’t do it again.

“When are your parents getting back?” Andrew asks.

“Not until tonight,” Nathan says. “They’re due in at seven.”

“I spoke to my parents last week. They said they’d look for me in the TV coverage of the Pride March next week. It really touched me, that they’d say that. I didn’t even have to mention that there was going to be a Pride March, they already knew.”

Silence from Nathan. Celia gathers her hands into fists.

“Are you going to march this year, Nathan?”

Nathan stands up and walks over to the stereo. “No,” he says. He puts a recording of Ravel on the turntable.

“That’s too bad,” Andrew says.

Celia considers screaming, insisting that they stop right here. Andrew knows that Nathan has never marched, will never march, in the annual Gay Pride Parade, ostensibly because he considers such public displays “stupid,” but really because he lives in fear of his parents discovering his homosexuality. The last time she visited him here Nathan and his father sat in the library and talked about stocks. All night he was the perfect son, the obedient little boy, but on the train ride back he bit his thumbnail and would not speak. “Do you want to talk about it?” Celia asked him, and he shook his head. He would hide from them always. The happy relationship Andrew enjoys with his liberal, accepting parents is probably his most powerful weapon against Nathan, and the one which he withholds until the last minute, for the final attack.

“I’m carrying the alumni group banner in the march this year,” Andrew says.

“Good,” says Nathan.

“I really wish you’d come. You’d like it. Everyone will be there, and it’s a lot of fun to march.”

“Drop it, Andrew,” Nathan says. “You know how I feel. I think that kind of public display doesn’t do any good to anyone. It’s ridiculous.”

“It does the marchers a lot of good. It does the world a lot of good to see people who aren’t ashamed of who they are.”

“That’s not who
I
am,” Nathan says. “Maybe it’s part of
what
I am. But not who.” He turns and looks at the rose garden outside the window. “Don’t you see,” he says, “that it’s a question of privacy?”

“In any battle for freedom of identity there can be no distinction between the private and the political.”

“Oh, great, quote to me from the manual,” Nathan says. “That helps. You know what’s wrong with your party-line political correctness? Exactly what’s wrong with your march. It homogenizes gay people. It doesn’t allow for personal difference. It doesn’t recognize that maybe for some people what’s politically correct is personally impossible, emotionally impossible. And for a politics which is supposed to be in favor of difference, it certainly doesn’t allow for much difference among the ‘different.’
” His pronunciation of this word brings to their minds the voices of elementary school teachers.

“I think you’re underselling politics, Nathan,” Andrew says.

“Oh, just give me a break, Andrew, give me a break,” Nathan says. “You know the only reason you ever found politics was because you had a crush on what’s-his-name—Joel Miller—senior year. You had a huge crush on him and you were scared little Andrew and you were afraid to use the word gay. I remember distinctly all the little ways you had of talking around that word. ‘I’m joining the widening circle,’ was all you could say to Celia. I remember that. ‘The widening circle.’ Where in hell you came up with that phrase is beyond me. And then there’s hunky Joel Miller who’ll only sleep with you if you wear a lavender armband and talk about ‘pre-Stonewall’ and ‘post-Stonewall’ every chance you get and suddenly our little Andrew is Mr. Big Political Activist. Jesus. You’re right about your politics, about there being no separation between the private and the political.”

He turns away from Andrew, clearly disgusted, picks up the jacket of the Ravel record and begins to read the liner notes furiously.

“I can’t stand this anymore,” Celia says, then sits down on the sofa. Neither of them seem to have heard her. Nathan looks as if he might start crying any second—he cries easily—and a slick smile is beginning to emerge on Andrew’s face.

“Nathan,” he says, “do I detect a note of jealousy in your voice?”

“Go to hell,” Nathan says, and storms out of the room.