Stages (21 page)

At one point Paula’s mother blew her nose loudly and said, tearfully, “I just can’t understand it. On top of everything else, this veal dish is
wonderful.
”

“Did
you
make this?” Paula’s father asked.

“Of course,” Veronica said as she serenely lit a cigarette. “If you want, I’ll make it for this therapist you think is so terrific too.”

A week later, she did. The therapist, a woman with soft gray hair and accessories that looked as if they might have been hand-tooled by people in occupational therapy, asked lots of polite questions.

The last one, and the most pointed one, was, “What do you think happened to Paula Rubin?”

“She was bored to death,” Veronica said.

The next morning the therapist called Paula’s mother and told her that in her opinion there was absolutely nothing wrong with her daughter.

“A girl who wants to be an
actress
?” Paula’s mother cried.

“She can
cook
too,” said the therapist.

38

The old firehouse where the Gay Activists Alliance held its meetings and dances was located in a part of the city that was too deserted at night to be dangerous. Wooster Street was in the middle of a no-man’s-land between the West Village and the Lower East Side. Surrounding the firehouse were blocks of somber nineteenth-century cast-iron factories. These buildings, which once had housed sweatshops, were now either vacant or given over to light industries that were anonymous save for the big bolts of fabric or the dirty bridal veils in their windows.

Walking down Wooster Street from where he’d gotten off the bus on Houston, Mike would stick his hands in his pockets. Every so often drops of water would fall from the buildings, whether or not there had been rain. Mike imagined that the gutters had rusted through. Sometimes he liked to think that the city’s sorrows were distilled here in the gray air outside these viewless windows. In the middle of side streets Mike would see sodden piles of rags that had been pulled by scavengers from uncollected bales. He would think with a smile that if his mother ever saw Wooster Street and its environs, she would say that the whole shooting match should be given to the Salvation Army.

Since he’d been involved with the gay liberation movement, Mike hadn’t witnessed a scene—or even an hour—to equal the Stonewall rebellion. That, he assumed, was because gay people were not naturally radical types, or revolutionaries. Radicals always had their lists of demands, but what did gays want, basically? Just to be allowed to live their lives without comment or interference from anybody. You were supposed to occupy federal office buildings to make
that
demand?
Please leave me alone?

A month before the meeting Mike was attending tonight, Merle Miller had spoken at the firehouse, to a big crowd. His article in the
New York Times Magazine,
“What It Means to Be a Homosexual,” had created a stir, and there were some among the firehouse crew who thought it was gay Uncle Tomism, because it had more to do with what Miller himself had lived through than what was happening now. What was happening now that was so different, Mike had asked himself at the time, except that they’re not raiding the bars anymore. There was something about the whole tenor of the times that Mike did not quite trust; the political was too often indistinguishable from the fashionable. People made fervent speeches at the firehouse and then went straight to Julius. It looked like Bloomingdale’s was going to survive the revolution too.

And there were times when Mike felt that virtually everyone he knew was becoming addicted to sex. The sexual revolution, like most revolutions, was becoming a tyranny even as people danced in the streets.

Mike’s lack of enthusiasm tended to irritate his activist friends.

“You’re twenty-four years old and as tired as some queen who’s sixty,” he’d hear. He was constantly admonished to get over it or get with it or to come out of the trenches. One of his constant critics was Rusty, who would sit at meetings on the edge of his seat, or perched on the back of a folding chair, his feet on the seat and his ass right on the cutting edge of the chair’s back. Rusty was a little over twenty. His red hair was always tied in a ponytail with the little elastics and clips that secure supermarket vegetables in their plastic bags; he wore sweatshirts, and bell bottoms so low slung that a big wedge of his bare back was visible even in February. Nearly everything out of Rusty’s mouth was a protest. Once Mike had said to him, “If you were any more militant, you’d be a dyke.”

As Mike walked into the firehouse on this unexceptional night, Rusty was denouncing the secretary, Steven, for not doing a better job of coordinating a zap of some Yiddish-language newspaper (Mike hated zaps; they were confrontations staged for the evening news, and about as effective as somebody standing on a ledge on the ground floor).

Steven was much too pudgy and sensitive for Rusty to be picking on him. When Steven was upset, as he was now, he reddened and became even puffier and seemed to want to hide somewhere out of reach.

“I think this was a really dumb fuck-up, man,” he was yelling. “What kinda shit is this, our people showing up a half hour after the fucking joint was closed for the day?”

Mike saw even before he sat down that Steven’s lower lip was beginning to flutter.

Oh no,
he thought.

“If you can’t get it together, then fucking go back to Long Island,” Rusty shouted.

Steven had filled up with tears and looked ready to squirt them all over the room.

Mike closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to witness this.

But still he had to listen to Steven blurt out, “If you don’t think I’m doing my job…if I’m just
not wanted
around here anymore…”

“Oh, stop bullying him, for God’s sake,” Mike finally snapped.

Rusty looked down at him scornfully from where he was riding shotgun atop the back of his chair. Mike was deliberately slouching—point, counterpoint.

“Look,” Rusty said. “Anybody who doesn’t want to do anything around here fucking doesn’t have to come here.”

Steven had begun to sulk. The president, Matt, made him drink a glass of water. Then Steven began to take notes again, but he wouldn’t look at anyone.

Mike and Rusty argued for another five minutes.

Then Matt banged the gavel and it broke.

“That’s what she gets, looking for things on sale at A&S,” someone said.

After a while they got back to the second of the eight items on the agenda. They were then almost an hour into the meeting.

When it was finally over, Mike and Matt walked together up Wooster Street.

“You going to the bars?” Matt asked.

“I guess,” Mike replied. “I’ve been sitting for three hours. I might as well stand for another two.”

As they walked past the unlit, bleak buildings, Matt’s mood began to change from exasperation to anticipation.

“This should be some weekend coming up,” he said. “Washington’s birthday. Every bar in the city will be
jammed.
”

Gays were always reinforced by a sense of how many people like themselves there were out there, Mike had noticed. There was safety in numbers. There was also a better chance of scoring. Not that Mike could deny the little lift in his own spirits that came from knowing they were on their way to the bars. How tantalizing was the night, though it was so often untender—

You want to go to my place?

You’re on.

“Tell me,” Mike said. “If it isn’t too personal a question, that is? Are you…happy?”

“With my life, you mean?” Matt asked.

Mike nodded.

“Reasonably,” Matt said. “One of the last times I saw my analyst, he said that it’s too bad I wasn’t born twenty years from now. That’s when we’ll have seen the real progress, he said. Being gay will just be considered a natural thing. If gay kids want to go to the high school prom together, it’ll be totally accepted.”

“I’m not so sure,” Mike said. “Sometimes I wonder if what we have now isn’t just because of the war—it’s distracting everybody. And when it’s over they’ll gradually get back to pushing us around.”

“Uh-uh, no way,” Matt replied. “Once you’re out of the closet you don’t go back in again. And the kids who are coming along now will be starting a lot earlier than we did too. They won’t be growing up thinking they’re the only ones in the world…

“I never thought I was the only one,” Mike said. “It was that the ones I saw all looked like old men.”

“Now all the older queens are wearing these,” Matt said, looking at his leather jacket. “It’s like Charles Laughton playing Marlon Brando in
The Wild One.
”

“If I never find a lover, may I at least have a dignified old age,” Mike said. “That’s one thing about working in a restaurant. If you stay with it long enough, you get to manage a place, or maybe even own one. Then you get to seat people in Siberia, if you want to. Now that’s
power.
”

“I thought you were an actor.”

“Mm. There’s a gay company forming, I hear. I might look into it. They want to do plays that present gay characters in a positive light.”

“A
Suddenly, Last Summer
where they only nibble on him a little?”

“No, new stuff. Who knows? We’ll see.”

They were walking west on Houston Street and were almost at Seventh Avenue.

“I saw the cutest guy in Julius a couple of nights ago,” Matt said. There was a lilt in his voice, suddenly, and a smile appeared on his face. “Real classic looks,” he continued. “Curly blond hair. Blue eyes. And what
attitude.
He had his cute little nose so high up in the air a bluejay could have come along and snatched it.”

“A lot of good that’ll do him,” Mike said. “He probably wound up going home alone.”

“I sort of like ’em conceited like that,” Matt said. “It’s like…gay pride with a vengeance.”

“Or it’s just selfishness,” Mike said. “But more likely it’s defensiveness. Deep down, he’s probably no different than Steven.”

“Oh, come on, Michael, give me a break. Steven’s vulnerable ’cause he was a little fat boy.”

“
Everybody’s
vulnerable. Sure, it’s nice to be pretty and know that everybody wants you, but in the end, you’ve got to want somebody too. And
that
is a need that’s going to make you vulnerable.”

“Oh shoot,” said Matt. “Well, I can at least fantasize that there are a few people who are…
above
all these grubby insecurities.”

“What do you want to do that for?”

“Escape, do you mind? You need a little of the movies in everyday life, you need a rack of romance novels next to the day-old bread—and you, an
actor,
should know that much.”

“I’m from Boston, don’t forget. With the Puritan gloom. All roads lead to the cemetery. And the body is five percent water and ninety-five percent cold feet.”

“I
remember
now why I like going to the bars with you,” Matt said. “With a poop like you in tow, I appreciate the party that much more.”

At Julius Matt’s nightly party was in full swing. One of New York’s oldest bars of any stripe, Julius was filled with photographs of sports figures and horse races from forty years ago. In the back, the walls and ceiling, painted the color of a blackboard, were swarming with the initials and dates and hearts of people who had wanted to send a valentine to Saturday night, in perpetuity. Barrels served as tables, and the floor was covered with sawdust.

He and Matt ordered a beer, for openers, and then they leaned against the wall opposite the bar while sizing up the crowd.

“Hey, there’s my little friend,” Matt said, nodding toward the back. Mike looked. He saw a young man, a bit on the short side, who could have passed for the Littlest Angel in the Christmas cartoon he’d seen when he was in first or second grade—only this little angel was all grown up, and wised up, too.

“Cute, huh?” Matt prodded.

“Sweet expression,” Mike replied.
“Dare to speak to me and you die.”

“Maybe I’ll just sort of mosey on over there,” Matt said. “Take the chance that he’s secretly vulnerable, like you said.”

“Good luck to you,” said Mike.

On the whole he was rather pleased to be left in the effervescent but quiet company of his beer. Someone standing next to him was telling a newfound friend, “I’m a photographer, but I work as a waiter.”

Ever thus to the arts,
Mike thought.

He hadn’t had an acting job in a year and a half.

What were you supposed to say to somebody who asked you what you did? “I compromise myself every day, so I can eat.” True, but somewhat offputting. Maybe Matt was right. We should resort to romance.

Out of the corner of his eye Mike saw the hardened cherub Matt was so nuts about making his way through the crowd. Perhaps he’d sensed that poor Matt was about to approach him. Too bad. Mike reverted to his beer. In any bar he was as careful of his drink as his grandmother used to be of her change purse on the bus. Everybody’s defensiveness was expressed in different ways. Mike expressed his by drinking with infinite care.