In Memory of Angel Clare (11 page)

He shouldn’t pretend the boy was still Laurie and Carla’s problem. It was time he did something, said something, helped this arrogant boy he disliked so much. He knew he disliked Michael partly because he saw his own egotistical suffering in the boy, untempered by age or self-understanding. Jack understood himself all too well. He owed it to Clarence and the others to come down from his critical height and make some of his self-awareness Michael’s self-awareness.

There was a theatrical scream as the sex maniac-killer fell from the catwalk and crashed through the lights. The body hit the dance floor like a side of beef, which was what Clarence had used for the sound effect. Then more dancers arrived, Danny among them in his third role. Not noticing the stunned people staring at the corpse in the flashing, thumping darkness, the newcomers began to dance around the dead psychopath. Fade-out to the closing credits, accompanied by another shrill song from the East Village band managed by the producer’s girlfriend.

Jack stepped into the room and gingerly sat on the edge of the bed. Reverently watching the credits, Michael drew back an inch so they wouldn’t touch. Jack knew what he watched for and patiently waited for it before he began the conversation.

There it was: “Special thanks to… Jack Arcalli… Michael Sousza…” Then the disclaimer about the story not representing real people, and the screen went blue and silent.

Jack leaned forward and turned off the set. “And they all lived happily ever after,” he joked.

“Get away from me, stupid.”

But Michael was only pushing Elisabeth Vogler off him, as if ashamed of showing affection to Jack’s cat. He sighed importantly. “I’ve now seen this sixteen times,” he announced.

“Really? I’ve seen it maybe a dozen,” Jack admitted. “It’s better in a theater. You know, they’re showing it next month at Cinema Village. On a double bill with
Suspiria
.” An artsy, incoherent Italian horror film Clarence had hated. Jack attempted a wistful smile. “It’s funny. Both of us giving so much time to a bad movie.”

Michael looked puzzled. “You think it’s a bad movie?”

“It’s your basic generic horror film. Except for the dance scenes and some of the camera angles.”

“You must not understand it,” Michael sniffed.

Jack had intended to use the movie only to talk about what they had in common. He tried to resist the impulse to argue film. “No, it’s nicely shot and some scenes without dialogue are striking, only—What do you see in it?”

“It’s a disturbing film.” Michael addressed the blank screen. “It’s full of menace and tension and death. Everybody dies in it. It’s like… Jacobean tragedy.”

Michael knew as much about Jacobean tragedy as Jack’s cat did, but Jack did not pursue that. He had been afraid the boy would say the movie was about AIDS. “It’s a scare machine, Michael. Like all those movies.”

“No, it’s only disguised as a horror movie,” the boy insisted. “It’s more serious than that. I’m surprised at you. That as a friend of Clarence and a film critic you can’t see that.”

Jack winced. “Well, Clarence said some pretty negative things about it himself.”

“Of course. That’s his right as an artist. The results never live up to the artist’s expectations.” Michael sat up on the bed, drawing his knees against his chest and wrapping his arms around them. “All the artist can see is his failure. Clarence worked very hard on that movie. I was with him from start to finish on it. There were nights when he didn’t get home until three in the morning, then had to be up again at six. A normal man would’ve been exhausted, but not Clarence. He was too high on his movie. Because he believed in it.”

“He worked very hard on it,” Jack agreed. Clarence had claimed he didn’t take the project seriously, then threw himself into it completely. Clarence didn’t do anything halfway. He exhausted himself on that movie. Which must have weakened his body and triggered the thing that eventually killed him.
That
was what was disturbing about the movie, even tragic: it had killed Clarence. Maybe that was why Michael had to believe it was a good movie: the irony of Clarence dying for schlock was too black for anyone so young.

Jack gently said, “You miss him, don’t you?”

“Of course!”

He sounded offended, and Jack was sorry he had brought it up so abruptly. “No, I know you do. I think about Clarence every day,” he confessed. “So I can imagine what you must feel.”

Michael stared long and hard at Jack. He clutched his folded legs and stroked the long bones. “I wonder if you can,” he said. “I wonder if any of you can guess what I’m feeling. You were only his friends. I was his lover.”

Jack kept his temper. Michael took what Jack granted him—the possibility Clare’s death hurt him more than it hurt Jack—and slapped Jack in the face with it. He could ignore the other bits of arrogance that barbed Michael’s conversation, but not that one. And he classed Jack’s grief with everyone else’s, which stung.

“Maybe. But he was my best friend,” Jack said quietly. “We knew each other twenty years, Michael. Friends become more than just friends when you know them that long. They become part of your mind, part of your reality. When they’re gone, it’s like reality has broken in two.”

“That sounds very abstract and neat. What I feel is messy and real.”

“What I feel is just as real, Michael.” Why did the boy fight him on this? Did he think grief was too valuable to share? A frail emotion that might evaporate if divided among others? “As real and painful as what you’re feeling,” Jack insisted.

“No. It can’t be. Because I
lived
with him. I had sex with him.” Michael grew more vehement. “Having sex with someone bonds them to you in a way you wouldn’t understand. You don’t understand his movie and you don’t understand love.”

You little shit, thought Jack. Don’t you know what I’ve offered to do for you? “I have sexual feelings,” he muttered. “I even fall in love. I loved Clarence as a friend. And not that it matters, but I even had sex with him.”

Michael glared. “
You
?”

Jack hadn’t intended to say that. Repressing other thoughts, he had let that one jump out. Why? “A long time ago, Michael. Fifteen years ago. I don’t know why I mentioned it.”

Michael narrowed his eyes at Jack, as if trying to picture him with Clarence.

“Only two or three times,” Jack apologized. But he had no need to apologize. “It was when Clarence first moved to New York and lived with me for three months. In this apartment, in fact. He’d been to Europe and had lived in D.C. a year. And I was just coming to terms with myself, so he let me experiment with him a few times. We discovered it wasn’t what we wanted from each other.” Jack remembered the first time most sharply, when he finished too quickly and had to work and work to get Clarence to finish, confused and depressed that the erect cock in his mouth and the naked body squirming in his bed seemed to have nothing to do with the Clarence who was his good friend from college. In sex, too, Clare could be a disingenuous tyrant. That was the first occasion when Jack irritably wondered if Clarence seemed gentle and benevolent only because of his inability to put thoughts into words.

Michael took a deep breath. “I don’t care. Clarence slept with anyone back then. He even slept with Ben.”

“And a thousand others,” said Jack, getting back at the boy for
anyone.
“Actually, he thought he was in love with Ben, until he realized what he loved was having sex with a guy. Ben was his first.” Jack was surprised Michael knew about Ben. He remembered being jealous of Ben that semester, without knowing exactly what was going on between him and Clarence.

“But you were never in love with him, were you?” Michael said sharply.

“No,” said Jack. “I wasn’t.” Which was probably true.

“Then it’s not the same,” Michael concluded. “What you and I are feeling. Because I was in love with Clarence. And he was in love with me. I couldn’t care less you fooled around with him. I don’t see why you brought it up.”

“I brought it up only because—I want you to know he was an important part of my life, too, and I have as much right to grieve as you do. You shouldn’t be jealous of us because we knew Clarence before you did.”

“I’m not jealous,” Michael sniped. “I’m just sick of people telling me what I should feel.”

“Nobody’s telling you what to feel, Michael.” Were they?

The boy gave his head a shake, his curly hair quivering like jelly. “Why can’t people let me feel what I feel in peace?”

“We do. We’re only offering sympathy.”

“I don’t want your sympathy.”

This time, Jack saw what to do with his exasperation. As gently as possible, he said, “Then maybe it’s time you didn’t see so much of us.”

Michael cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

“If we’re such an annoyance to you, Michael, if you think we’re always telling you what to feel, then it might be better for you to spend time with other people. People who didn’t know Clarence. So you wouldn’t feel they were forcing their sympathy on you. You should be meeting other people,” Jack said kindly. “People your own age. You’re not stuck with just us, you know. We’re not your family.”

Michael’s brown eyes became wide and worried. He lowered the upturned nose that looked faintly piggish when his chin was raised. The arrogant boy turned into a frightened child. “You don’t want me around anymore?”

And Jack realized with a start:
We are his family.
Michael had nothing to do with his real family. “No. Not that, Michael. We’re your friends. I was just saying we can’t be good for you. We’re a closed little world and you should get out a bit. Like you did when you went to Europe.”

Michael looked nervously around, then looked down and saw his toe sticking out of his sock. He reached down and pulled the hole around so it wouldn’t show. He pulled his arrogance back around him. “You think I want a new boyfriend?” he said sarcastically.

“No, I don’t,” said Jack. “But I do think it’s time you started doing things. Maybe some kind of job.” He hesitated. “Maybe found your own place to live.”

“But I have my own place.”

“It’s really Laurie and Carla’s.”

“I don’t mind sharing it with them. They give me my privacy.”

“Maybe they want a little more privacy?”

“No. We’re fine,” Michael insisted. “And it’s Clarence’s apartment. I need to be there.”

Jack made a face, wondering how to get around that belief.

“You don’t think I really mourn Clarence, do you?”

“What?” Jack couldn’t understand where that had come from. “Of course we do. We just feel it’s time you went on with other things.”

“You think I’m faking it!” Michael said angrily. “You don’t think it’s real.”

“I know it’s real. Because I feel something like it. But I go on with my life, Michael. I write my dumb reviews and live my dumb life. You learn to live with it.”

“You can,” Michael sneered. “But he was the only life I had. You were nothing but his friend. What I feel’s got to be ten times worse than anything you’re feeling. It’s got to be!”

“Then go out and kill yourself if you feel so damn bad!”

Jack could not believe he had said that. Confused by Michael, he had let his guard down and his anger took him by surprise. He should not have said that.

But Michael looked very hard and contemptuous, invulnerable. “What do you know?” he sniffed. “You’re nothing but a silly old library queen.”

Jack was feeling too guilty to take offense. He accepted the epithet with a shrug. Suddenly, both of them found it very hard to look at the other.

“Speaking of which, I should be getting back to the piece I’m writing.”

Michael nodded and scooted to the edge of the bed to put his shoes on. He avoided Jack’s eyes, nervously, not contemptuously, as if maybe he were feeling bad for what
he
had said. They had both gone too far. “May I quickly use your bathroom?” Michael asked the floor. “Certainly. Do you know where the light is?” Jack was back in the kitchen, standing over his typewriter, when Michael came out. Jack considered apologizing, but an apology might give too much importance to what he had said, which had been a nasty way of hitting someone with the limits of their grief, nothing more. Michael didn’t apologize either. They were politely formal with each other.

“Thank you for letting me see the movie.”

“Thank you for dropping by,” Jack said, opening the door for him. “Give my love to Laurie and Carla.”

“See you later,” said Michael.

As soon as Jack closed the door, the conversation began to run back and forth in his mind, Jack finding all the places where he had said the wrong thing. He was such a buffoon with people, where you can’t do another draft and correct your mistakes. He should have apologized for saying what he said. He should not have said the things suggesting they wanted to drive Michael
completely
out of their lives. He should have given more attention to Michael’s sudden fear they thought he was “faking” his grief. Jack admitted the boy’s grief must be as real as his own, but exaggerated, or Michael wouldn’t be so defensive and insecure about it. The boy strained to love Clarence more in death than he had in sickness. Thinking that, Jack wondered if he too exaggerated his grief. Overdoing an emotion can make it bigger than life, easier to handle, and just a little ludicrous, like the emotions in opera. He wondered if he were exaggerating the importance of his conversation with Michael for the same reason. And yet, he continued to worry the encounter around his head.

He came back to his confession of having had sex with Clarence, and stopped.

It was probably the least of his mistakes, but Jack lingered over it for the sake of the memories underneath. The sex itself was no longer important to Jack. There had been a time a few months after Clarence’s death when he tried to use the sex to bring Clarence to life in his imagination, making love to himself with the memory in hopes he could fantasize a sharper picture of Clarence. All that ever gave Jack were his hips and thighs and hairless chest, a face as self-absorbed as when Clarence listened to music. No memory key or madeleine, sex led only into itself. What had been most important about the event, and valuable, were the moments leading up to it.