In One Person (74 page)

“She doesn’t mean me—she
knows
me,” was all Bovary said. He was all business—Mr. Money Manager, I was thinking.

Then we crossed the Gran Vía into Chueca, by that towering building—the Telefónica. “We’re still a little early,” Señor Bovary was saying, as he looked again at his watch. He seemed to consider (then he reconsidered) taking a detour. “There’s a bear bar on this street,” he said, pausing at the intersection of Hortaleza and the Calle de las Infantas.

“Yes, Hot—I had a beer there last night,” I told him.

“Bears are all right, if you like
bellies,
” Bovary said.

“I have nothing against bears—I just like beer,” I said. “It’s all I drink.”

“I just drink
agua con gas,
” Señor Bovary said, giving me his small, twinkling smile.

“Mineral water, with bubbles—right?” I asked him.

“I guess we both like
bubbles,
” was all Bovary said; he had continued walking along Hortaleza. I wasn’t paying very close attention to the street, but I recognized that nightclub with the Portuguese name—A Noite.

When Señor Bovary led me inside, I asked, “Oh, is
this
the club?”

“Mercifully,
no,
” the little man replied. “We’re just killing time. If the show were starting
here,
I wouldn’t have brought you, but the show starts very late here. It’s safe just to have a drink.”

There were some skinny gay boys hanging around the bar. “If you were alone, they’d be all over you,” Bovary told me. It was a black marble bar, or maybe it was polished granite. I had a beer and Señor Bovary had an
agua con gas
while we waited.

There was a blue-tinted ballroom and a proscenium stage at A Noite; they were playing Sinatra songs backstage. When I quietly used the
retro
word for the nightclub, all Bovary said was, “To be kind.” He kept checking his watch.

When we went out on Hortaleza again, it was almost 11
P.M.
; I had never seen as many people on the street. When Bovary brought me to the club, I realized I’d walked past it and not noticed it—at least twice. It
was a very small club with a long line out front—on Hortaleza, between the Calle de las Infantas and San Marcos. The name of the club I saw only now—for the first time. The club was called
SEÑOR BOVARY
.

“Oh,” I said, as Bovary led me around the line to the stage door.

“We’ll see Franny’s show,
then
you’ll meet him,” the little man was saying. “If I’m lucky, he won’t see you with me till the end of his routine—or
near
the end, anyway.”

The same types I’d seen at A Noite, those skinny gay boys, were crowding the bar, but they made room for Señor Bovary and me. Onstage was a transsexual dancer, very passable—nothing
retro
about her.

“Shameless catering to straight guys,” Bovary whispered in my ear. “Oh, and guys like
you,
I suppose—is she your type?”

“Yes, definitely,” I told him. (I thought the lime-green strobe pulsing on the dancer was a little tacky.)

It wasn’t exactly a strip show; the dancer had certainly had her boobs done, and she was very proud of them, but she never took off the thong. The crowd gave her a big hand when she exited the stage, passing through the audience—even passing by the bar, still in her thong but carrying the rest of her clothes. Bovary said something to her in Spanish, and she smiled.

“I told her you were a very important guest, and that she was
definitely
your type,” the little man said mischievously to me. When I started to say something, he put an index finger to his lips and whispered: “I’ll be your translator.”

I first thought he was making a joke—about translating for me, if I were later to find myself with the transsexual dancer—but Bovary meant that he would translate for my father. “Franny! Franny! Franny!” voices in the crowd kept calling.

From the instant Franny Dean came onstage, there were ooohs and ahhhs; it wasn’t just the glitter and drop-dead décolletage of the dress, but with that plunging neckline and the poised way my father carried it off, I could see why Grandpa Harry had a soft spot for William Francis Dean. The wig was a jet-black mane with silver sparkles; it matched the dress. The falsies were modest—small, like the rest of him—and the pearl necklace wasn’t ostentatious, yet it picked up the powder-blue light onstage. That same powder-blue light had turned all the white onstage and in the audience a pearl-gray color—even Señor Bovary’s white shirt, where we sat at the bar.

“I have a little story to tell you,” my dad told the crowd, in Spanish. “It won’t take very long,” he said with a smile; his old, thin fingers toyed with his pearls. “Maybe you’ve heard this before?” he asked—as Bovary whispered, in English, in my ear.

“Sí!”
shouted the crowd, in chorus.

“Sorry,” my father replied, “but it’s the only story I know. It’s the story of my life, and the one love in it.”

I already knew the story. It was, in part, what he’d told me when I was recovering from scarlet fever—only in more detail than a child could possibly have remembered.

“Imagine meeting the love of your life on a
toilet
!” Franny Dean cried. “We were in a latrine, awash with seawater; we were on a ship, awash with
vomit
!”

“Vómito!”
the crowd repeated, in a unified cry.

I was amazed how many of them had heard the story; they knew it by heart. There were many older people in the audience, both men and women; there were young people, too—mostly boys.

“There’s no sound quite like the sound of a human derrière, passing a succession of toilet seats—that
slapping
sound, as the love of your life approaches, coming nearer and nearer,” my father said; he paused and took a deep breath while many of the young boys in the audience dropped their pants down to their ankles (their underpants, too) and slapped one another on their bare asses.

My father exhaled onstage and said, with a condemning sigh, “No, not like that—it was a
different
slapping sound, more
refined
.” In his glittering black dress with the plunging neckline, my dad paused again—while those chastised boys pulled up their pants, and the audience settled down.

“Imagine
reading
in a storm at sea. How much of a reader would you need to be?” my father asked. “I’ve been a reader all my life. I knew that if I
ever
met the love of my life, he would have to be a reader, too. But, oh—to first make
contact
with him
that
way! Cheek to cheek, so to speak,” my dad said, jutting out one skinny hip and slapping himself on the buttocks.

“Cheek to cheek!” the crowd cried—or however you say that in Spanish. (I can’t remember.) He’d met Bovary on a toilet, butt to butt; how perfect was that?

There wasn’t much more to the show. When my father’s story, about the love of his life, was finished, I noticed that many of the older people
in the audience quickly slipped away—as did nearly all the women. The women who stayed, I realized only later—as I was leaving—were the transsexuals and the transvestites. (The young boys stayed, and by the time I left the club, there were many more of them—in addition to some older men, who were mostly alone, no doubt on the prowl.)

Señor Bovary led me backstage to meet my father. “Don’t be disappointed,” he kept whispering in my ear, as if he were still translating and we were still sitting at the bar.

My father, standing in his dressing room, was already stripped to the waist—wig off—by the time Bovary and I got backstage. William Francis Dean had a snow-white crew cut and the starved-down, muscular body of a lightweight wrestler or a jockey. The little falsies, and a bra no bigger than Elaine’s—the one I used to wear when I was sleeping—were on my dad’s dressing-room table, all heaped together with the pearl necklace. The dress, which unzipped from the back, had been undone only as far as my father’s slender waist, and he’d slipped the top half off his shoulders.

“Shall I unzip you the rest of the way, Franny?” Señor Bovary asked the performer. My father turned his back to Bovary, allowing his lover to unzip him. Franny Dean stepped out of the dress, revealing only a tight black girdle; he’d already unfastened his black stockings from the girdle—the stockings were rolled at his narrow ankles. When my dad sat at his dressing-room table, he pulled the rolled-down stockings off his small feet and threw them at Señor Bovary. (All this before he began to remove his makeup, starting with the eyeliner; he’d already removed the fake eyelashes.)

“It’s a good thing I didn’t see you
whispering
to young William at the bar until I was almost done with the Boston part of the story,” my father said peevishly to Bovary.

“It’s a good thing
someone
invited young William to come see you before you’re dead, Franny,” Señor Bovary told him.

“Mr. Bovary
exaggerates,
William,” my dad told me. “As you can see for yourself, I’m
not
dying.”

“I’ll leave you two alone,” Mr. Bovary told us in a wounded tone.

“Don’t you dare,” my dad said to the love of his life.

“I dare not,” Bovary replied, with droll resignation. He gave me a long-suffering look, of the you-see-what-I-put-up-with kind.

“What’s the point of having a love of your life, if he’s not
always
with you?” my father asked me.

I didn’t know what to say; I was quite at a loss for words.

“Be nice, Franny,” Señor Bovary told him.

“Here’s what women do, William—small-town girls, anyway,” my father said. “They find something they love about you—even if there’s just one thing they find endearing. For example, your mother liked to dress me up—and I liked it, too.”

“Maybe
later,
Franny—maybe say this to young William
after
you’ve had a chance to get to know each other,” Mr. Bovary suggested.

“It’s too late for young William and me to get to know each other. We were denied that opportunity. Now we already are who we are, aren’t we, William?” my dad asked me. Once again, I didn’t know what to say.

“Please
try
to be nicer, Franny,” Bovary told him.

“Here’s what women do, as I was saying,” my father continued. “Those things they
don’t
love about you—those things they don’t even
like
—well, guess what women do about
those
things? They imagine they can
change
those things—
that’s
what women do! They imagine they can change you,” my father said.

“You knew
one
girl, Franny,
una mujer difícil
—” Mr. Bovary started to say.

“Now who’s not being
nice
?” my dad interrupted him.

“I’ve known some
men
who tried to change me,” I told my father.

“I can’t compete with everyone
you’ve
known, William—I couldn’t possibly claim to have had
your
experience,” my dad said. I was surprised he was a prig.

“I used to wonder where I came from,” I told him. “Those things in myself that I didn’t understand—those things I was
questioning,
especially. You know what I mean. How much of me came from my mother? There was little that came from her that I could see. And how much of me came from
you
? There was a time when I thought about that, quite a lot,” I told him.

“We heard about you beating up some boy,” my father said.

“Say this
later,
Franny,” Mr. Bovary pleaded with him.

“You beat up a kid at school—rather recently, wasn’t it?” my dad asked me. “Bob told me about it. The Racquet Man was quite proud of you for it, but I found it upsetting. You didn’t get
violence
from me—you didn’t get
aggression
. I wonder if all that anger doesn’t come from those
Winthrop women,
” he told me.

“He was a
big
kid,” I said. “He was nineteen, a football player—a fucking bully.”

But my father and Señor Bovary looked as though they were ashamed of me. I was on the verge of explaining Gee to them—how she’d been only fourteen, a boy becoming a girl, and the nineteen-year-old thug had hit her in the face, bloodying her nose—but I suddenly thought that I didn’t owe these disapproving old queens an explanation. I didn’t give a shit about that football player.

“He called me a
fag,
” I told them. I guessed that would make them sniffy.