I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (19 page)

“Where do I fit in?”

He patted my hand. “Imagine.”

“Can’t.” Rich people think it’s dashing when you leave out the subject pronouns.

“Well … my sweetheart Claudia and I can’t face it alone, is the thing.”

“He can’t face it,” said Claudia. “I sense it’s high time I made my debut. And had another wee drinkie.”

“They’ve never met her, you know. My parents.” In this place, you simply point to a glass and a waiter refills it. Guy pointed; a wee drinkie for Claudia. “And if there were a group of us, I was thinking … well, just saying to Claudia, in fact. If there were someone we could
call
 … and you came along like the cavalry. I mean, look: fellow schoolchum, old boy network, author and man-about-town, aunts and uncles gather ’round to worship, parents impressed … You can take the pressure off Claudia and me.”

“I don’t want to spend Christmas being your ruse,” I said. “And I’m not a man-about-town and I
don’t
approve of closet cover procedures.”

“Jeepers, man, must I sing ‘The Red and Black Fight Song’?” This was Friends Academy’s football anthem, the stirring performance of which before each game seemed to guarantee our stupendous defeat, though we probably would have lost, anyway. At least we played. When the wrestling team stood challenge to a public school, we sometimes defaulted matches because one of our side refused to go to the mat with a black. “I’ll give you my watch. I’ll give you my shoes.”

“Guy—”

“Anything you want, for heaven’s sake!”

“What I want, you cannot give.”

“Unlike me,” Claudia observed. “I want to star in a revival of
Flora, the Red Menace.
Guy could produce it, like a sugar daddy of the 1920s.”

“Don’t sing,” Guy told her, because she often does, anywhere, loud.

But the sad truth of it was: What else did I have to do?

*   *   *

One thing you must not dare is to enter a rich people’s Christmas in less than the higher threading; we repaired to my place so I could change. While Claudia poured herself another wee drinkie, Guy glanced through my closet and silently chose a suit, tie, shirt, and handkerchief. “Black socks and shoes,” he concluded.

“I could have done that myself,” I said.

“I’m faster.”

“This is my fanciest suit,” I noted. “Just how heavy is this party, anyway?”

“Well, it’s the whole clan, you know. The one time of the year when we’re all together. Even Aunt Eliza—and she doesn’t come to anything.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s the command performance, old chap. It’s major, is what. So you can see how terribly eager I am to breeze through it, if possible. You see it, don’t you?”

I took the clothes into the bathroom. “Excuse me for saying so,” I whispered, “but aren’t your parents counting on your showing up with some debutante? Claudia isn’t exactly a Colonial Dame right off the
Arbella.
”

“That’s her charm.” He winked at me. “You aren’t planning to wear those dark glasses, are you? Have you any horn-rims or something like that?”

“Whoa!”

“Anyway, I don’t have to show up with a fiancée, just a date. They simply want to assure themselves that I’m not … you know.”

“Tutti-frutti.”

He giggled. “Actually, Claudia is perfect casting. She’s so colorful they won’t put me through this again for at least a decade.”

I stopped dressing and looked at him.

“But lest she overwhelm the place,” he went on, “you can lend our company an air of … well…”

“Zoom!”
said Claudia, edging in with her wee drinkie. “I want to zoom all over, like Liza in ‘Mein Herr.’ Can I go in dark glasses, too?”

We compromised on the glasses: I wore none at all, which makes me dangerously liable to nearsighted acts such as trying to charm people who are glaring at me.

The streets were deserted all of a sudden: New York had all gone home. In the cab, Claudia went into a medley of what she called “show biz goldies”—mostly
Carousel
cut with
On Your Toes
—but broke off when she took in the depth of the gathering snowfall and breezed into “White Christmas.”

“Come on,” she urged. “Somebody on harmony.”

“It would be funny,” I said, “if after all this I did something embarrassing at the party.”

Guy turned a bland smile on me, which read, Anyone who went to school with Guy Webster is a perfect gentleman.

Traffic was moving so slowly that Claudia had time not only to put us through “White Christmas” but to drill us in descants and festive effects, such as adding “and emerald” between the two words of the title and having the men impose a descending chromatic line over the melody on “May your days be merry and bright.” It sounded ragged but sweet, and I caught the taxi driver furtively joining in. Through it all, I was distracted by the humming of the meter, but Guy was perfectly at ease, as are all rich people when they hear money being spent, including their own. I don’t mean just anyone with money, mind you, but the
genetically
rich, those born to a culture of largesse—a culture as textured and developed as the gay system is. One Christmas in my youth, I was given a cocker spaniel puppy who was so excited to be out of the kennel that he couldn’t settle down and go to sleep, so my mother put a clock in his basket and the ticking soothed him. So it is, I believe, with the rich and taxi meters.

“Next could we do ‘Good Christian Men, Rejoice’?” said the taxi driver.

“We only do Broadway-type carols,” said Claudia.

“On the right, driver,” said Guy. “Fourth house along.”

It was literally a house: the Websters lived in the whole thing. The front door alone warned you that the building was like a human bank: an immensely thick bar of glass protected fore and aft by elaborate iron webbing. The man who opened the door actually called our host Mr. Guy, which gave Claudia the idea of going as Miss Glama de Ponselle.

“Claudia,” Guy said, “things are touchy enough as it is.”

“Miss Glama,” she insisted, “is ready for her wee drinkie. Miss Glama de Ponselle.”

“Guy!” cried a handsome man in the most beautifully tailored dinner clothes I’ve ever seen, sailing down the stairs. “Well, egad, old son!” They shook hands, and Guy introduced him as Cousin Brian. Another thing about the rich is that the men are usually good-looking but not sexy.

“And I’m Miss Glama,” said Claudia, before Guy could say she wasn’t. “Believe me, one day when I’m a celeb, you’ll wish you knew me.”

“I wish I knew you now,” Brian answered, amused.

“Did Aunt Eliza make it?”

“Everyone’s here, and there’s a heavy air of Santa in the air. Come along, lad. Now is the time for the good little boys to claim their reward.”

I bet it’s somewhat more than a dollar, too, I said to myself as we ascended. Aunt Agnes’ was never like this Christmas. True, there were the seniors sedately postured, the aunts and uncles grouped, the little kids in cute little versions of grown-up clothes racing around deliriously. But there was none of the sit-back-and-dish atmosphere that my aunts observed, none of my uncles’ hearty thunder. There were no decorations, no presents, no bowls of pretzels. Surely no Monopoly game was in session down the hall. There were waiters wafting about with trays of fancy food that no one named Webster had cooked, little groups of people nodding to each other, and even the pianist noodling show tunes was clearly a hired man, not some obliging nephew.

“Piano bar!” Claudia breathed.

“Miss Havisham,” I murmured, viewing a tremendous crone in a stupendous chair bearing a fabulous cane. Other family types posed behind her like lawyers at a board meeting.

“That’s Aunt Eliza,” said Guy.

“Claudia and I will scatter to the bar,” I offered.

“No,” said Guy, clutching us. “This is central.”

“Guy,” Aunt Eliza wheezed, as we approached. “Guy,” she added, as he kissed her cheek. “Guy,” she concluded, pounding her cane. “Do you smoke?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you drink?”

“Sometimes.”

“That’s a good boy. That’s a man. I hate a smoker, or a pantywaist who doesn’t know his whiskey.” She eyed Claudia, who curtsied as to royal majesty. “Lovely, child.” Aunt Eliza proposed the kissing of her sere cheek, and Claudia managed nicely. “Whose is she? Ellen’s? Is it Ellen’s girl?”

“No, Aunt Eliza, this is my friend—”

“Miss Glama de Ponselle.”

Aunt Eliza listened to the name as one attends agitated noises in the hall outside one’s apartment door. “I sense New Orleans or such.”

“Boston.”

The old bag brightened. “Ah.”

Now I was dragged forward, introduced as a writer.

“I love Dickens,” Aunt Eliza declared, not to my surprise. “Are you Dickensian?”

“Sometimes,” I said, as Little Nell, Smike, and Sidney Carton shrieked in their graves. “With a modern edge.”

“Rubbish!” Aunt Eliza remarked. “Guy, you will appear before me later. I’ve something to give you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Having earned our dollars, we slipped over to the bar as Guy greeted his family.

“I know the pianist,” Claudia told me. “He plays at Carstair’s.”

“Do you people hire out?” said Brian, coming up. “Guy’s not the only one who needs support at parties.”

“The writer’s all booked up with Dickensian novels,” said Claudia. “But I’m possible.”

Brian smiled. Great teeth, and surprisingly broad shoulders for a rich boy. At Guy’s signal, I excused myself, crossed the floor, dodged two adorable little girls imitating robots and screaming “Wind me up! Wind me up!” and found myself facing Guy’s parents.

There are two kinds of rich parents. The men are either Ichabod Crane or Franklin Roosevelt and the women are Eleanor Roosevelt or Queen Elizabeth II. Guy had FDR and the Queen. Stunning; and they had this way of speaking so profoundly about such trivia that after two minutes with them you’d be ready to best Henry James at parlor banter.

“Layered,” was all I said to Guy as we moved on. “Heavily layered.”

“He published seven of the ten most imposing novels of the early 1950s and she opened the first surrealist gallery in New York. They should have had you for a son. Now it’s Claudia’s turn.”

“Do you know Glama sings?” said Brian, joining us. “At this very moment she’s—”

“Oh, my gosh,” Guy whispered, turning to the piano.

“You,” Claudia was singing, very freely, “do,” with her hands folded together, “something to me.” The pianist swung gracefully into rhythm, Claudia’s hands opened, and the guests gathered round as Miss Glama launched her vaudeville.

Brian told Guy, “You have gifted friends.”

The odd thing was, Claudia was good. Hags who take over at the piano usually try to jazz up “Mister Snow” or tack a cakewalk finale onto “My Heart Stood Still.” Claudia did not overplay, or blow lyrics, or go flat. She sounded like a pro doing a gig. She and the pianist were so in tune that on the second chorus they jumped the key a whole step without signaling to each other; something in her voice warned him and he followed. There was applause and, after scarcely a second’s whisper, the pianist struck up “The Physician,” Cole Porter’s number about the doctor whose interest in his patient is strictly physical. It’s what used to be called “naughty”: wittily suggestive if you’re worldly but shockingly doubly-meant if you aren’t. I wondered how Aunt Eliza might take it. She was oblivious, busy with her inquisition; and those of the guests who were listening seemed appreciative.

“‘But he never said he loved me,’” Claudia sang.

“Is she in the theatre?” Brian asked me.

“I believe so, yes.”

“She’s a brick. You so often hear this song camped about, don’t you? But she’s ace with it. Fresh.” I was surprised to hear this knowledgeable commentary, but then I reminded myself that rich people often know about Cole Porter, because he was One of Them: rich. On the other hand, he was also One of Us: gay. Just then, Guy’s father asked if he could speak to me upstairs.

I toyed with asking, “Why?” One advantage in attending rich people’s parties is you can get away with anything, though of course they may not ask you back, which is their idea of punishment. But I was here as Guy’s diplomat, and felt bound to “suave it out,” as Little Kiwi has taken to putting it.

“‘But he never said he loved
me,
’” Claudia sang, as I affably accompanied Mr. Webster up another rolling stairway into a room of leather and wood, books and prints—and, astonishingly, an old wind-up Victrola, which instantly gave us something friendly to explore. As every aficionado does, Mr. Webster pulled out treasures to delight me, and, as the disks spun and the uniquely reverberant sounds poured out, I thought of my late grandmother, an unlovably eccentric but fiercely musical woman who introduced me to 78s. Her taste was much like Mr. Webster’s: symphony, opera, show music, and dance-band pop. As he retrieved Victor Herbert’s recording of his “March of the Toys” from the turntable, Mr. Webster said, “I feel it important to tell you that Mrs. Webster and myself are relieved.”

“Relieved?”

“That Guy has finally been honest with us.” He said this mildly, as he said everything. “He may have wanted to protect us by keeping his … well, his love life … secret. But I don’t think it truly serves a family to be too discreet. There is such a thing as intimacy, isn’t there?”

“Surely.”

He put no more records on, so this was what he had wanted to speak of. But why to me?

“I expect it is premature to say so, but I think Guy has done well for himself. I confess, I really wasn’t sure what … sort of person, if I may say so, we were to encounter.”

“Ah.”

“Guy tells me you went to Friends Academy together.”

“Yes.”

“I always think it best when two people share a background. It makes the routine things so much easier.” He smiled. “As opposed to the notorious
nostalgie de la boue,
if you’ll pardon my boldness.”

Suddenly I had the impression that I was missing something. Not as much as I would have been missing if he had been speaking, say, entirely in Lithuanian, but something at the core of the topic.

“How long,” he then said, “have you and Guy been lovers?”