I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (15 page)

“You promised him blueberries.”

“For dessert!”

“You made it sound as if the blueberries were hors d’oeuvres.”

“Blueberries for hors d’oeuvres!” Christopher cries in mock society-horror. “What would Lady Gumbo say?”

*   *   *

I went walking through the Grove to think. Every time I stay in the Pines I have epiphanies and adventures; in the Grove I just have a stay at the beach. It’s like the Jersey shore gone gay. There’s no group there to offer anything to.

But the Pines one must join. Is this why it has its outraged detractors? Were they not invited to belong? A friend of mine denigrated the Pines in favor of the Grove, till one day a friend of his bought a ritzy house in the Pines with a pool on the ocean: and very quickly and quietly the Pineshater transferred his affections.

The Pines gives back what you offer, no more. You don’t come out looking like Fatso McDump, knowing no one anyone wants to know, and expect to be crowned King of the Pines. Yes, there is more beauty gathered here than elsewhere, and the beach insistently reveals it; so is this elation or despair? Does the congregation of dream palazzi with their two-story love dens under skylights of stars reproach you for lack of swank?

I think the Pines is friendly. It is young, and was founded on elation; the Grove died years ago, in despair. It is never inclusive or convivial, as the Pines routinely is; of course a beauty is bitter in Belvedere—in the Grove, beauty is suspect. How often I would trade hellos with some dazzling stranger as we passed on the Pines boardwalk. Never once did this happen in the Grove.

Till now. I was wearing a Yale T-shirt, light blue with the letters in huge white blocks across my chest, and one of those swank workmen who are forever tooling along the planks in motor carts suddenly stopped and called out, “Is that Yale for real?”

“Surest thing you know,” I answered.

“Harvard, ’61,” he said, smiling. He looked too young to be class of ’61—maybe he meant he was born at Harvard in ’61. “It’s a small world.”

“That it is.” I smiled back, and off he went.

Well, it’s a loose confederation to make a coincidence of, but ’twill serve. I felt chipper when I got back, and, as Christopher was out, I took the Gräfin to tea in the Pines, proudly leading her through the Grove like L’Enfant touring friends about D.C. At Belvedere, she stopped and stared at the place, at the empty courtyard, the dizzy pile, the discreet nameplate. Eric and I had rushed past, panicked by the angry houseboy who knew he was in the wrong place. The Gräfin pauses to take this wonder in. “Belvedere,” she reads out, looking through the gratings at the turrets and gingerbread. “Belvedere,” she repeats, listening to the sound. “Not Jewish.” She shrugs and moves on.

“Why do you make such a big deal about religion, Helen?” I ask. “Are you forming a club?”

“The club is already formed.”

We were passing into the Judy Garland Memorial Park that lies between Grove and Pines. I’m never sure exactly where I’m going through all those paths and copses—Eric can do it in the dark—but we glided along without a step wasted, arriving at tea just after seven.

“Will you know many people?” The Gräfin asks as we snake around the cut of the harbor. She senses that Eric is a celeb, and it takes one to know one. “I may know some,” I say doubtfully.

I know one, in the event: Michael, one of my publishers, who has the sexiest hair in lit. Michael knows everyone. The Gräfin is thrilled to meet him, too, but Michael is taken aback when the Gräfin tells him she never reads; reading is highest calling to Michael. As the talk proceeds, the Gräfin wanders off, and moments later I see her engaged in conversation with a stranger. You have to admit, she has nerve. Rejoining us, she says, “That is Bob the Accountant. Very nice. But I suddenly remembered that I have to take my mother’s jewelry out of the bank and wear it every so often.” She turns to Michael. “Do you prefer the necklace? Or the ring?”

Michael looks at us as if we were a mountebank and his zany, stirring up a medieval plaza for strolling theatricals. Still, he invites us to drinks at his house on Beachcomber, on the way back to the Grove. The Gräfin celebrates by picking up Bob the Accountant once again on our way along the boardwalk.

Michael looks back at them, as if to say, “What
is
this?” He’s too polite to ask, but I answer anyway: “Helen is very into non sequitur, but she has a sweet heart.” It sounds like the first line of the last hundred novels Michael rejected.

Michael has a palazzo. The entree takes one up to the kitchen, where we meet one of the most Nordic-looking people I’ve ever seen, shirtless, tending a huge pan of chicken breasts. Michael introduces him as Erhart. Helen disengages Bob the Accountant at the very doorstep, which I think is strangely cute. But after one look at Erhart, she parks herself outside the kitchen window and stares.

I think of her words outside Belvedere: “Not Jewish.” Erhart stirs the chicken, noting Helen, as Michael pulls out glasses and vodka. Finally she speaks, and what she asks Erhart is:

“Is that your bar mitzvah watch?”

“Helen,” I warn her, “no kvetching.” I turn to Erhart.
“Wollen Sie Deutsch sprechen mit dieser Frau, Erhart? Sie hätte es gern.”

Erhart looks confused. “I am Swiss,” he says. It sounds relevant, but it isn’t.

The Gräfin has entered the house. “Is that tarragon chicken?” she asks. “You speak English very well for a Swiss.”

“I am not Swiss,” he says. Erhart,
please!
(It later turns out that he means that his parents are Swiss, but he is total American, and speaks no German.)

Michael shows us the house. Quel palazzo—and guess who owns it? Erhart. It has a pool, a superb viewing aerie on the roof, separate decks for each bedroom, and a sunken conversation nook.

How would Larry the schmarotzer feel if he were here? Better? Famous? Included?

The nook is so comfortable that I decide that the combined cow-hurling teams of Zürich, Bern, and Luzern won’t move me, but the Gräfin, as always, is restless. Away we go, then, racing down the beach through that virulent wind that patrols the space between Pines and Grove. “He’s so warm!” the Gräfin screams of Michael as we run the sand. “He makes you feel as if you’d known him all your life!”

No, Helen, I carefully fail to say. He is, like anyone with will and intelligence, heedless of those without it. Everything is forgivable but non sequiturs; the strong warm to the other strong. We stagger through the Grove, drunk on swank, and find Christopher inside on the couch, reading in the dark—indeed, holding his book up to the window to catch light that went dead an hour before.

He has eaten all the blueberries.

Still, we have a merry time, high on tequila sunrises, planning a cookout, and making up risible songs. The Gräfin sings “Surabaja Larry” and “Un bel dì, Schmarotzer,” and Christopher and I use
Schmarotzendiva
and
Schmarotzenkunst
in every sentence. It’s a little like a Boy Scout Jamboree, eating hamburgers under the stars and singing around the dying embers of the campfire. Except at a Jamboree you’re not allowed to be silly. I wonder if I should be having quite so good a time on a sexless jaunt to a sexual paradise; when I’m forty, I bet, I’ll regret having missed every single opportunity to score.

The Gräfin, at least, is having a ball, raving over the view from Michael’s roof and instructing me to get into that house next summer so as to invite everyone out. Even Erhart, by the chemistry of the Gräfin’s self-delusion, has become an icon, a collectible. The Gräfin is telling Christopher he could not hope to eat such chicken as Erhart cooked; but she never tasted it.

Did I not warn you that gay life is a chain of tales? Sometimes outsiders claim a tale or so, and we become merely characters in their adventures. In Helen’s view, this story is called, “And Eric Actually Came.”

One of the island’s attractions is the sudden cold of the night, invigorating amid the lurid Manhattan summer, when everything is made to feel the way a fun-house mirror looks. But even inside the house it’s too cold for fun. The wind is fierce. As the Gräfin tries to close a window, it flips its seams and smashes on the deck, immediately followed by all the other windows; the big glass-topped dining table on the porch decides to go, too. This is so shocking that we bundle into our beds without another word.

*   *   *

The next morning we were standing around drinking coffee and giggling in a pile of broken glass when Eric walked up. “What is this,” he cries, “the Amityville Horror?” The Gräfin is thrilled all over again and scampers off to the kitchen to enthrall us with an imperial breakfast.

Eric has come to go. He is positively considering possibly leaving the Island maybe this afternoon if but. I say, “Let’s.” Then he doesn’t want to.

I will make him, for I have had enough of a good thing. I pack, we make farewells—Christopher is as ever bemused at my emphasis on handshaking; he thinks close friends don’t have to. As the Gräfin calls out desperate envois, entreaties, passwords, and inconclusions, Eric and I depart to buy sandwiches at the Pines Pantry and watch the beach parade. Dressed, clutching bags, eating sandwiches on the steps commanding the beach, we seem to be waifs kicked out of their houses. “Well, I’m
not
walking past David’s blanket!” a queen tells his companion as they approach the sand. Seeing us, he adds, “Do you
have
to be here?” as he brushes past.

Do we? I tell Eric about Michael, Erhart, and the palazzo. “You had Major Tea,” he cries.

“What do you recall most when you leave? The beauties, the attitude, the sand sculpture?”

“What’s in your sandwich?” he counters.

“Salami, cheddar, Swiss, lettuce, tomato, peppers, mayo…”

“On a roll!” He is scandalized. “And they charge extra for each item!”

We watch the beach parade. The Belvedere houseboy is there, now in his element, grinning.

I think of my Pines visits: first one, hottest one, most social one, most lavish one.

I think of my own “What I Saw in the Bars,” that it would take me back to the summer of 1973, when I walked into a gay place for the first time. A high school friend, who was by then an old campaigner in the scene, from back rooms to status-skirmishing over cocktails, outlined the stylistic differences, from Harry’s Back East way down to Keller’s. I decided on the Eagle, and boldly strode in only to feel an arm swing out, grab me, and pull me over to the wall. It belonged to a man I’d never seen before; he was smiling; it was Eric. My high school friend, standing next to him, had said, “There he is now” when I walked in. Though they would not have stated it in precisely these words, they had come to welcome me. Eric and I immediately began to speak as if we had known each other all our lives, and though my high school friend was notorious for being able to charm anyone inside of two minutes, the speed of the intimacy he had helped fire unsettled him. “Now I’ll lose both of you,” he complained.

“Look at that one!” Eric gasps, as a ruddy gymnast strolls along the parade, rippling with attitude. “Right now, he’s devastating, but in five years he will be unbelievable!”

“Unless he burns out on drugs of pleasure,” I suggest, my mouth full of sandwich. “Or has been had by everyone who ought to have him. What’ll he do then? Do you think he’ll keep any friends?”

“Are you kidding? Look at those shoulder caps!”

“Ah,” I reply. “But are they his own?” An old Broadway joke.

I think of how neatly this scene would transfer into cinema, most likely French: two writers perched on a kind of bleachers, watching and commenting as birds of rare plumage stalk past.

“Do you by any chance remember…” I begin, then stop; he is already shaking his head and smiling. He never remembers what I remember. We entertain contrary nostalgias, even for Pines weekends we spent in each other’s company. I was going to ask him if he recalled an afternoon when we sat way far back against the dune pickets. The beach was empty and the wind tart. Even in sweatshirts we were shuddering. I had just told Eric that
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
was the only great book I had never read and he was testing this with other possibilities. He jumped from Frank Norris to Petronius to Flaubert; still, he couldn’t trip me up. Then he was silent, determined to find a sure thing. At last he spoke, with the ring of triumph:
“The Man Without Qualities!”

“Do you really think that’s a great book?”

Just then a man we knew of from the Eagle’s great old days walked into our line of vision. He, too, had been there on my first night, and like the rest of us was there on most other nights too, a golden-blond hero who, for some of us, was kind of a poster for gay: Join up and you’ll look like this. Now his hair was almost gone and his famous stomach had given way to creeping metabolic slowdown, yet he moved as if he still had it. Somewhere off to the right, we heard a woman’s voice calling, “Kokomo! Kokomo!” A cocker spaniel came running up to the man, who knelt to pet him as he frolicked. “Kokomo!” the woman insisted. The dog at last obeyed and ran off. The man saw us as he rose, recognized us from the old days, and, though we had never spoken to him in our lives, shot us a marvelous smile and waved as he turned to go.

“Harvard, ’61,” I murmur, thinking of this.

“What?” says Eric.

“Nothing.”

I wonder how long it will be before the threatened beach erodes right up to the house line.

I consider what I offer to the group.

I eat my sandwich.

“‘Do you
have
to be here?’” I echo. “That’s a good question, isn’t it?”

“What happened to the blueberries?” Eric asks.

At the ferry slip he gets into a confusion over the possibility of an ice-cream cone. I buy one; he doesn’t.

And the ferry glides into the harbor, filled—as my little brother Tony used to say—to the grim. Except no: everyone’s smiling, expectant, tolerant. It’s exciting to be here. As the boat passes the tea crowd, a few people wave, some wave back, someone calls out a real name like Jim or Steve, more people wave and others cheer, the ferry toots a whistle, and now everybody is cheering from the island to the boat and back. Everyone is waving and smiling.