I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore (20 page)

That’s
what I had been missing.

“I will respect your silence,” he went on, “if you would rather not speak of this.”

I tried to collect my thoughts.

“Do you, like me, speak Lithuanian?”

No, he didn’t say that—yet he might as well have done, given the flow of conversation. As so often with closeted scions, the parents were better informed than had been supposed. Well, what do you do when the father of your friend says he likes your friend’s taste in romance, as opposed to the hard-hat or trucker he might have chosen if
nostalgie de la boue
had won out? I was still speechless, momentarily bemused by the picture of the meticulous Guy seeking something hot from the underworld. Guy’s idea of rough trade is a Raggedy Andy doll.

I had to say something. “Who,” I said, “is that masked man?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My family gives a party like this, though rather more informally. Or we used to give them. And like other Americans we took movies. You know those old home color reels, that you’d send to Rochester in those yellow boxes?”

He nodded, intrigued.

“Well, my parents moved to California not long ago, and before they left we hauled out the films and ran them one last time in the east. There’s one of me, at the Christmas party, in a Flub-a-Dub mask. And the strange thing is, I didn’t just wear that mask for the movie. I wore it all day, from meatballs to ice cream, no matter what anyone said.”

“But what is a Flub-a-Dub?”

“The Flub-a-Dub was a character on the Howdy Doody Show. Grotesque, animalistic, and illiterate. His act consisted of mixing up words.”

If Mr. Webster was a publisher, he would know a theme when he heard one outlined.

“A rather piquant choice of alter ego for a writer,” he observed.

“Well, I’m not illiterate. But I do mix up words, in a way. And the mask is the essential image, not the character.”

“The mask?”

I nodded. “I am the masked man.”

He thought. “But you were not … forgive me—not hired, surely?”

“I was beseeched.”

“I see.”

“Guy’s got a mask on, too. And he’ll probably be glad to take his off. If you tell him you know, and that it’s all right.…”

He considered this solemnly, then slowly unfolded a Mona Lisa smile. “I believe I thought I
had
told him.”

“In those words?”

“I don’t suppose one ever does anything in precisely the words. You make it sound ingeniously simple. Was it like that with your parents?”

“My parents,” I said, “are too attached to their children to let the luck of the draw cause trouble among us.”

He thought this over, slowly winding up the record player. “Then,” he announced at length, “I will play you one last side, and no pun is intended.” It was Fanny Brice’s “Cooking Breakfast for the One I Love.” Superb. And downstairs we then went.

*   *   *

Claudia was on break, a wee drinkie in her hand, Guy and Brian flanking her.

“How can you not be sozzled by this time?” I asked her. “All those drinkies.”

“Oh, they’re mostly ice,” she said. “And I never finish them. Drinking is entirely a matter of style.”

“We have to talk,” said Guy—but his father, Mrs. Webster attending, was pointing to him the way Guy had pointed to Claudia’s glass in The Varsity House. Whatever you want, the rich are taught from infancy, just point to it.

Gazing about me, I thought, This is the ultimate completion of the Christmas bachelor: to sanction the festivities of strangers. I hate party small talk. I hate food cut into tiny strips on silver dollars of white bread. I hate being served. I hate Aunt Eliza. How is one to feel his blood at such a party? You believe in the Christmas you were raised on; you cannot cross over.

“What did you tell him?” Guy asked me, a bit later, when he returned from upstairs. “Egad, they’re …
happy!
”

“I didn’t tell him anything,” I replied. “They already knew.”

“Knew what?” asked Claudia.

“That the world is full of masked men,” I replied.

Now we were all summoned to the elders’ part of the party, where the presents were to be distributed. There were no forts or gas stations, no megaphone, no Uncle Mike. There weren’t even packages. It was all envelopes, even for the littlest kids; and thank yous were not hurled out but solemnly nodded. One gift put a stutter into this ceremonial rhythm, when Aunt Eliza pulled out a battered jewelry box of the kind that Edwin Drood might have kept his collar studs in. She opened it, gazed upon its contents, slowly extracted an antique watch, and said, “Come here, Guy.”

He came.

“This was Grandfather’s,” said Aunt Eliza, her voice cracking. “You must have it now.”

Hums and murmurs.

“It has tradition on this Christmas day,” she went on. “It has a meaning in the family. And that is the most important thing to have.”

There should be film on this, I thought. Too bad there were no cameras about. Cameras and masks and watches, a Christmas!

Aunt Eliza handed the watch to Guy and commemorated the presentation with a crash of her cane. Everyone clapped.

“There are four of those watches in the world,” Brian whispered to Claudia and me. “One for each of my great-great-grand-uncles. Three have been passed on, so this is the last of the group.”

The casing was silver, elaborately chased, the inner surface inscribed with a name and date, the piece itself extraordinary. That’s one thing rich people are good for: amazing presents.

They are also good for inviting you out to the Brasserie for some real food on plates, which Brian did after Claudia had sung another set and Aunt Eliza had raged at a minor cousin who had had the temerity to challenge her politics. I could almost hear her roaring, “Are there no prisons?
No workhouses?
”

We were all somewhat carefree as we paraded downstairs to get our coats, and on the far side of merry by the time we had reached the restaurant and made the first toast, to Aunt Eliza’s cane. Brian was a grand host; without imploring or condescending, he made you know that he would feel disappointed if you didn’t go for it and order something really spiffy.

I was jovial. Guy was utterly on top of the town, for the only serious problem in his life had been solved: his folks now knew of and proposed to live with his sexuality. And Claudia was shining, with three straight men playing to her—Brian in the literal sense, Guy in the Pickwickian sense, and I in the vaudevillian sense. True enough, she didn’t really imbibe, just held. The rest of us, however, drank champagne, and Brian kept it coming. We men had reached that level of sauced euphoria in which we are still physically presentable but our mouths are blurting out confidences.

“This is the one, true Christmas,” I heard myself say. “Really. Consider its parts: relatives, champagne, presents, the Kissing of the Grandparents—”

“You didn’t get a present,” said Guy.

I shrugged happily.

After Brian excused himself, Claudia announced that she was up for a present that night.

“What?”

“Your cousin.”

“Take care, Claudia,” said Guy. “Brian’s something of a womanizer, you know.”

“Oh, that’s my favorite kind,” she replied. “What’s a womanizer?”

“A straight Lothario,” I explained.

“I’m in the nude,” Claudia sang, “for love…”

Guy suddenly said, “You know what they told me?”

“‘We still love you,’” I guessed.

“How did you know?”

“They always say that. The nice ones.”

“A writer,” said Claudia, “knows all the stories.”

“Did you ever hear about the gay bachelor on Christmas Eve?” I asked.

“Do tell,” said Claudia.

“He learns that if you can’t spend Christmas with your family, then you have an adventure.”

“That’s good to know,” said Claudia, “but the important thing is, you look so much better without those dark glasses.”

“That may well be,” said Guy. “I lost mine tonight, too.”

“How does it feel?”

“Sporty.”

Claudia raised a glass. “Christmas, love, and peace, fellow gypsies.” We clinked and drank. “Now each of us make a wish for the new year.”

“Mumps to my enemies,” I said.

“No cab strikes,” said Guy. “Claudia?”

“No more world hunger and an especially zoomy revival of
Mack and Mabel
with me as Mabel.”

“That’s two wishes,” said Brian, rejoining us. “And who’s Claudia?”

“What would you ask for?” she said.

He flashed a Piping Rock smile at her. “I like everything as it is.”

That’s the rich for you.

*   *   *

Outside the restaurant, we broke into couples, Claudia and Brian waiting for the correct moment in which to hail a cab and Guy and I doing that bashful, recapitulatory ceremony typical of gays who have shared an intimate experience yet do not really know each other. Rather than talk about ourselves, we admired the geography, Manhattan’s great stupas lighting the snowfall, the towers concealed in a brilliant mist, the vision a rhetoric of power and daring and elitism. These are the principles of Manhattan capitalism, and its setting that night was an electro-industrial Switzerland, virtually a natural wonder. And we belong to it, and own it.

From a few feet off, the sounds of “White Christmas” floated over to us, Brian gamely holding the descant on “May your days be merry and bright.” When we turned to see, they were kissing, and Guy and I shook hands like foxy grandpas.

Off the lovers went, and I walked Guy to Third Avenue before we, too, parted. We talked a bit more, aimlessly, then he put his hand in the pocket of my overcoat.

“This is a present,” he said. “Don’t take it out till you get home. Okay?”

“But I have nothing for you.”

I started to put my hand in my pocket, but he stopped me. “I demand,” he said, trying to cow me with his generations. “You already gave me mine.”

He pointed at a cab and it skidded over. I watched him pull away, and waved; but the rich seldom look back.

The first thing I did when I got home was to take Bauhaus out for his walk, the second to call my parents, the third to light up a pipe, and the fourth to pull Guy’s present out of my coat. It was a silver pocket watch, the inside of the cover reading, “
Tuyler Webster, 1878.”

*   *   *

“He must have been drunk!” Dennis Savage cried when I showed him. “You got him drunk and palmed his watch! You probably get your bed partners that way, too!”

“You ought to know.”

“Of course you’ll return it!”

“Of course,” I agreed, thinking that could take years.

“Besides robbing the rich and starving Bauhaus, not that he doesn’t deserve it, what else have you been up to while I was gone?”

“I’ve been writing up my Christmas adventure!”

“Branching out into science-fiction?”

“It just so happens, Mister Smarty, that I spent Christmas holding a family together, and teaching a closeted gay to have confidence in himself, and setting up a very cute straight couple. What did you do, may I ask? Add to your sister’s already legendary Tupperware collection and try to lure your brother-in-law into wrestling matches. What’s more, I’m writing a Dickensian story about it, with, I must admit, a modern edge. What have you written lately? And I have learned what place an orphan may take in the Christmas pageant, and that a bachelor may luxuriate in Christmas spirit as surely as any family man. After all, I can’t go to Aunt Agnes’ for the rest of my life. I can love tradition in other ways. Yea, I can undergo the rites. You think not? You are a benighted queen. I can give and be given to. And, by the way, contrary to what you believe, it turns out that Christmas is about love, after all. The name is love. And I have learned all this, and you have learned—and in any case know—nothing. So what do you have to say to that, you soigné debutante?”

He sat down, crossed his legs, and smiled. He mimed lighting a cigarette, puffing, exhaling. He smiled again. “You know what you aren’t?” he said. “New wave.”

The Disappearance of Roger Ryder

Gay life has not only its episodic naturalism—its true stories—but its mythology, too. On those nights out at the Pines when heavy rain prohibits a walk to the dance hall and a table cluttered with dinner things reproaches the slightest attempt to Do Something, one of us will recount a legend or two, perhaps that of the most intense man in New York, or the most handsome, or the most betrayed, or the most bizarre.

I prefer the tale of the most disguised man, the one who got to … well, listen and judge for yourself what he got. I have told this tale on many a night on the beach, sometimes including my listeners in the action. They may resent this, or laugh nervously, but they attend: for we are in these fantasies as surely as we are in our biographies.

*   *   *

I start with the unemployed actor Roger Ryder, standing on sand in the late afternoon, alone. The straight sweep of the beach, countless miles in either direction, is empty, as the code of the Pines recommends. Everyone else is housed and waiting. There will be tea, dinner, startling recreations: the summer begins.

Roger paces, carrying a Scotch and dying a little faster than the rest of us, because hope is an oik jeering in the gallery. Most actors arrive on some level by the time they’re twenty-eight, a minority come through in their early thirties, and a very few squeak by later through fluke or some unspeakable arrangement. All the others—most actors, in truth—wake up at the age of forty to realize that they have scarcely been actors at all. They are waiters or word processors and will never be anything else. Roger, thirty-three-and-a-half, worries more than he hopes.