JD (15 page)

“I gotta get back to the library,” Willis said. I guess he's studying for his orals, reading Spenser and all the other claptrap you have to read just so you can require the next generation to read it. “I'm meeting Eddie later for a drink, you want to come?”

“Sure. Just stop by my office when you're ready.”

I stayed a while, with my tepid Coke, thinking about Willis and Edouard. A tangle of thoughts that I can't, this morning, reconstruct. But something like what I was thinking on my way home from Villard's party a few weeks ago. I have never had a--what could the word possibly be? Willis probably says
boyfriend
, for God's sake, but I'm not sure I have any better word. Lover?
Camerado
, as old Walt would have had it? Not, on the one hand, just someone you've fucked a few times. And not, on the other, some kind of romance. Just someone who assumes you will be seeing him tonight or have a damn good excuse. Of course, that pretty well sums up life with Martha. Why should I wish to have it with a man? But if that isn't quite it, what is it? Here is the question Freud never asked. What do
men
want?

When Willis got back to my office he said Eddie was rehearsing overtime a little and maybe we could have dinner and meet him later at the Dubois. The bar where fairies dance together. Fat chance I was going to the Dubois, I was pretty sure I would arrive where angels dance together before I'd set foot in the Dubois. But we did go off to dinner, at a little Italian joint on Waverly. Willis's choice: a place he couldn't afford but that wasn't so costly I
couldn't pay for both of us. Rather a crafty way of getting me to buy dinner, maybe I've underestimated Willis.

Anyway, after dinner and a few drinks, I found that I was after all willing enough to go to the Dubois. I might see some friends, it was too hot to write, it was too hot to look for love in the West Fourth Street tearoom, anybody probably ought to see the Dubois just once. This morning I think that, beneath all these excuses, I was really going with some half-framed intention of making time with Eddie. Not to hurt Willis, and not because I was so irresistibly drawn to Eddie. I just had a momentary flash of how it might be, Eddie and I kissing forthrightly, stubble grazing stubble.

The Dubois was practically empty--maybe a dozen people scattered around when we got there at about 8:3O. It would just have been another dreary bar except for a cleared space with scuffed linoleum about the size of an SLS seminar table. The Dance Floor of Gomorrah! Fairies take up so little acreage in the world. This little ten-by-ten island hidden away in the great island of Manhattan, yet so dire a threat to decency and order that merely to set foot on it is to risk arrest.

Eddie was alone at a table for six. Willis kissed him on the cheek; I didn't. “Why such a big table?” Willis said. “You expecting people?”

“Dennis O'Grady thought he might come by.”

Why does it seem lately I can't go anywhere without running into Dennis O'Grady? I knew if he showed up I was going to wind up sparring with him. Which is fine, usually, I like a fight. But last night I just wanted to hang out.

While Willis went to fetch drinks--after waiting to see if I'd offer, when I'd already sprung for dinner--I said lamely, “Willis says you're a dancer.”

“Yes. With Brent Nicholas.” This said so modestly I figured being with this Brent Nicholas must be hot stuff, so I offered an appropriate little admiring grunt. “I was with the Manhattan Ensemble, but it's all so conventional,
warmed-over Balanchine. What we do at Brent Nicholas is … almost like a Happening. Except more structured, you know, the art and the lighting and the dance all coming together to …” He hunted for the word for a very long time, at last settling for a rococo hand gesture.

Ordinarily, this explosion of swishiness should have quite ended any notion I'd had of stealing Eddie from Willis. Instead I was, mystifyingly, even more attracted. I wonder if Willis was drawn to the same thing, the paradox of a flaming Apollo with a five o'clock shadow. I wonder what he and Willis do in bed.

Willis was back with our drinks.

I said, “Eddie was telling me about his dance company.”

“Oh, yes, you should go,” Willis said. “I mean … when does your new season start?”

“End of September.”

“Great. Maybe I can get Jonathan to come.”

I shrugged. “We'll have to see. I've never paid much attention to that stuff.” Possibly dismissing Eddie's life work wasn't an express route into his pants. But having to sit through an evening of art-lighting-and-dance was too high a price, no matter what it might have been like to have my head gripped by those powerful thighs.

One daring couple had at last ventured onto the little dance floor. They seemed to be enacting the mating ritual of orangutans. “Is that the Twist?” I said.

“No, that's the Frug. Nobody's done the Twist in years.”

“They're not even moving their legs. How is that dancing?”

“Edouard moves his legs. You want to see?”

I did, very much, but I just shrugged. They pranced to the floor and began doing roughly the same thing as the other couple. Eddie did indeed move his legs, while Willis stood stock still and dared only little hand waves.

I turned away from the floor show to find that Dennis and his little protégé had arrived. I said “Hi there!” to the kid--I'm afraid in the voice I use when I talk to infants
and small animals. “I didn't catch your name the last time.”

“Geoffrey-with-a-G,” he said.

“Yeah, I got the same problem. I always have to go Ascher-with-a-C.” This puzzled the puppy: I could see him trying to figure where the C would go. “How've you been, Dennis?”

“Great. We're just back from Fire Island. What are you going to drink, my sweet lobster tail?”

Geoffrey blushed through his sunburn and asked, who could have guessed, for a whiskey with ginger ale. He watched adoringly as Dennis went for the drinks. Then the kid turned to me and said, so help me, “How's your book going?”

I wanted to answer, “How's your diaper rash?” But it was an innocent question. I guess he'd heard me talking about it at Villard's and just figured it was a good icebreaker. Seeing how I was this famous writer and all. I settled for, “Ah. You know, summer, you get distracted.”

“I don't think Dennis ever gets distracted. Even at Fire Island, no matter how late we were out, he was up the next morning, writing away.”

This, too, was probably innocent. Sooner or later somebody is going to remodel sweet innocent with-a-G's face. I just said, “My.”

“It's funny, sometimes he writes about me. I don't mean anything mushy, I mean he'll write, ‘It's eight in the morning on Wednesday and Geoffrey is lying on the chaise longue and outside there are gulls and Sam is starting to cook bacon.'”

“This is poetry, or … ?”

“He writes it like poetry. I mean there's lots of short lines. But here's the thing: when he writes that way I could be the gulls or the bacon, you understand? I mean like, I'm a fact and they're facts.”

That is, yes, the way Dennis O'Grady writes. Perhaps a little more lyrically, but flattening things that way, until boy and gull and bacon carry the same weight in the world.
What is remarkable, I think, is that with-a-G should acquiesce, that he seems content to be just one of an infinitely extensible list of the things Dennis can see as he looks around him on a Wednesday morning. Well, I suppose the list is shorter on a Tuesday night, in the dark. Geoffrey must command Dennis's entire attention.

Dennis was back with Geoffrey's drinky and a beer for himself. Geoffrey said, importantly, “We were talking about writing.” And we had been, however briefly--instead of, as writers do, talking about money.

“About Jonathan's--what was it?--sociology book?”

“It's not sociology,” I said. “I want to--”

Then she arrived. It isn't just silly talk, about the muse. When she comes, with her tiny almost inaudible hint that you will spend the next months or years giving voice to, it doesn't feel like something going on inside your skull. It feels like something behind you, pressing gently on your shoulders: this way, this way forward.

I blurted out, “I want to write about boys.”

Dennis laughed. “Some Uranian thing? Boys with golden tresses, splashing around in the lily pads?”

“No. Boys the way they are now. The tension between their … animal yearning and their love of human skill and their rough sense of honor. All of that, and then the monochrome, valueless world we expect them to grow into.”

“Oh,” Dennis said. “Another tract about gray flannel suits.”

Willis and Eddie were just rejoining us. Eddie, with no idea what we were talking about, put in: “I adore men in gray flannel suits.” It occurs to me, this morning, that there is some connection between this surprising tropism and his attachment to drab, prematurely old Willis. Maybe a guy who spends his days spinning around with men in leotards finds something calming about men in flannel.

I said, “I adore men naked.” Just for the rhythm, when I'm not even sure it's so. I adore men in Samuel Gompers jackets.

Dennis said, “Well, nobody's naked anymore, are they?” This, too, was only for the rhythm, something he didn't think but that Geoffrey might find profound.

“That's my point,” I said, just to be contrary. But then I realized it was: “Even their very bodies are alien to them, a costume they've been made to wear and don't know how to walk in.”

Dennis considered this a second, then threw it off. “Hey, if you don't know how to walk, you can always dance.” He grabbed little Geoffrey and headed for the floor.

They danced. I said to Willis, “Is that still the--what was it, the Frug?”

“No, I think it's just something Dennis is making up.”

I was half watching Dennis and half turning over my last thought, or the last hint from the muse, whichever. Even their bodies aren't theirs. Was this just glibness? Of course it was literally true: from mandatory vaccination to the Selective Service System, young men are not
secure in their persons
, they possess no corporeal estate that cannot be repossessed by the corporate state. But I meant more than that.

Watching Dennis fling himself around in the dance he was making up, one might have imagined that he, at least, had retained title to his body. He was taking up half the floor all by himself; the other dancers were annoyed or grudgingly amused. Little Geoffrey had his back turned, didn't even look at Dennis's … unfelt exuberance, I thought at first, just a show. But maybe real exuberance: maybe just throwing his body in motion that way let him cast something off. Maybe kids dance this way now just to recapture for a moment how men felt when their bodies were truly their own.

By now Dennis had tied his shirt around his waist and was wearing just a sleeveless undershirt that exposed, astoundingly, a Semper Fi tattoo on his right arm.

I thought of joining in. Cutting in, as we did at dances when I was a kid. You would tap a guy's shoulder, and a
bizarre etiquette required him to surrender his belle to you and slink off to the sidelines. You might get just once around the floor and then somebody would cut in on you. Well, obviously, as Dennis and Geoffrey weren't actually dancing together, there was no shoulder to tap. Perhaps I could just go dance by myself. No one else seemed to need a partner.

I stayed in my seat. I told myself that it was just unseemly for grown men to cavort together like Mickey at his junior high sock hop. But I knew I was afraid. Of looking foolish? Even I who never quite mastered the foxtrot could probably flail around as well as anybody else. Perhaps I was afraid I might like it too much.

Dennis and Geoffrey took a break. Dennis was glowing a little with sweat. Little Geoffrey looked at him wide-eyed, as a deer must look at a salt lick. Funny, they hadn't looked at one another on the dance floor, but it had been a mating dance after all.

Everyone was going to pair off, Willis and Eddie, Dennis and Geoffrey, as if ready for the ark. Except these couples could hardly be counted on to repopulate the postdiluvian planet. Imagine: if the bomb ever falls, suppose it spares only the Dubois or the Poplar Bar, suppose the last men and women on earth are fairies and dykes? Facing the categorical imperative, but just not up to it, so very sorry. Dancing the extinction quadrille.

Oh, and am I so special because, in between my rounds of cocksucking, I managed to step out of the tearoom for a moment and sire Mickey? Probably suckered into it, how can I not wonder if Martha meant to entrap me with her
accident
, the diaphragm so conveniently left in the drawer on that fateful night? If I learned anything from Dr. Bartholdy, it is that there are no accidents.

So I the quasi-accidental father am the natural one and O'Grady is some etiolated freak? No, fairies are just the too richly feathered canaries in the mine, warbling the truth about all of us: that we don't believe in tomorrow, don't believe the cycles of living and passing the world on
and dying mean any more than the circling of the needle on the record player. I have a Mickey to care about. But I can't imagine a future for Mickey to dwell in, any more than Dennis O'Grady can.

We all just sat for a while, until Dennis said, “I was thinking.”

I said, “You were able to think while you were doing St. Vitus's dance?”

“Well, it's not as though I had to concentrate on getting the steps right. I was thinking, what you said, about boys--what was it?--feeling alien in their own bodies.”

“That wasn't quite right. What I meant was--” I found myself telling them about the kid in the tearoom, the JD with the Samuel Gompers jacket who despised himself because I made him come. I couldn't help it; I knew it was a story for this journal and not for a fun evening of dancing at the Dubois, but I couldn't help it.