Stages (29 page)

Hearing that her home was lovely, Mrs. Boris glanced around with an air of vague surprise as though she were seeing the wet bar with its glittering crystal and lacquered
chinoiserie
doors for the first time.

“We’re very happy with it,” she said to Kathy. “We always wanted a house with flowing spaces, and we finally got it.”

I’m glad your long struggle is over,
Kathy thought as Abe Boris presented her with a martini that looked like a vacant fishbowl. Kathy said, “Oh,
thank
you.” She drank very slowly at first, nibbling at the surface of her drink like a guppie and endeavoring not to miss a thing, lest she slip up and make a fool of herself.

Predictably, the conversation turned to the art on the walls.

“How long have you been collecting?” Aaron asked.

“We’ve been
into it,
as you kids would say, for more than ten years now,” Abe replied.

“That’s a striking picture,” Aaron said, pointing with his glass.

“That’s one of Kenneth Noland’s
target
paintings,” Ruth Boris said.

To Kathy the picture looked like a seasick dartboard.

The maid came in with a tray of hors d’oeuvres: a salmon mousse covered with cucumber slices and caviar, and bits of curried chicken rolled in macadamia nuts and stuck with toothpicks.

Kathy got a little too much cucumber and caviar on her cracker, and it started to spill as she lifted it to her mouth, so she had to catch it with her fingers.

“I guess I should be sitting in a high chair,” she said with an embarrassed smile.

Ruth Boris offered her another napkin.

Kathy couldn’t help but think that her mother would have said: “Oh, just lick it off your fingers.”

The gallery tour continued into the library, where Kathy and Aaron saw a De Kooning and a Jasper Johns and a Lichtenstein.

Kathy said that the Lichtenstein looked like the comics close up.

“I used to stare at them sometimes when I was little,” she said. “And I could see all these little tiny dots that made up the picture. My mother used to tell me, ‘You’ll go blind doing that.’”

Ruth lowered her bifocals on her nose a bit, and straightened a slightly crooked painting. Kathy thought that if you hung it upside down or sideways it wouldn’t look any better or worse. Her martini was going down more and more easily.

At first it had tasted tinny, but now it seemed almost silky. She had just about finished the drink when Abe handed her another one.

Halfway through the second martini Kathy experienced a revelation. She was pretending to admire a Cy Twombly painting that looked like a child’s scribbling when it dawned on her that it
was
a child’s scribbling. For that matter, everything on the Borises’ walls could have been the work of children. Kathy’s ears seemed to open suddenly too, in the same instant that her eyes did.

There was something about the way Abe Boris used the word
art
that wasn’t right. It was like the way Kathy’s mother used the word
car,
with familiarity but no understanding of the insides, the mechanics, the dynamics that made it come to life.

By the time they were ready to sit down to dinner, Kathy had become convinced that the Borises had been taken to the cleaners, but they would probably never wise up to the fact. It was like the emperor’s new clothes: as long as people said this stuff was good, it was good. If enough people have a vested interest in blindness, what difference does it make what you really see?

On the dining-room table was a carafe of wine that the maid kept refilling by some sleight of hand. As Kathy sliced a slightly crunchy spear of asparagus with her long pronged fork, a nasty urge to tell the truth came over her. The war might have ended, but Kathy could still get angry in the face of fraud or willful blindness. How could she say what she really felt, though, without insulting the Borises? She had another sip of wine. It may have been her second glass, or her third, she wasn’t sure. She heard her husband say, “I’d like to have an art collection myself, someday.”

“There are some new galleries opening up downtown,” Abe said. “In that district right by Little Italy where a few artists have been living—Soho, they call it. You might want to go down there on a Saturday and look around.”

“I’d be afraid of making a mistake,” Kathy said. “We’re so ignorant.”

“But you don’t have to know anything,” Ruth said. “It’s all in the eye.”

In a pig’s eye,
Kathy thought. She drank some more wine. Then she said, “I think I’d rather just have our few posters on the walls. Of some of the paintings that are in museums. I don’t get to go to a museum very often, but there’s this one painting at the Met that I absolutely love, of a man on a river, rowing a shell. It’s by Thomas Eakins. I always remember who did the paintings I really like. That painting of the man in the shell, it’s so
real,
and yet it’s like a somber-colored dream some Victorian might have had—Henry James or somebody.”

“Jackson Pollack died in a car accident, didn’t he?” Aaron put in. He was looking at the painting above Kathy’s head that she had identified in her own mind as a serving of gray spaghetti.

“I like Edward Hopper’s work too,” Kathy went on. “That flat light that always seems to come from a hidden sun.”

“You seem to know quite a little about art,” Abe said as if to a little girl reciting state capitals.

“I know what I like,” Kathy replied. “Winslow Homer. Childe Hassam. Martin Johnson Heade.”

“I doubt that any of those people would be on the cutting edge if they were around today,” Abe said. “They wouldn’t be…pushing the boundaries of our perceptions further out.”

“Somebody once said something like that to me about John Barth,” Kathy replied. “The writer.” The maid was about to refill her glass, but Kathy had picked it up before she could.

“So I read
Giles Goat Boy
,”
she continued. “And I thought,
This stinks.
So they told me to read this book by Donald Barthelme. I thought that stunk too. Then they gave me this book by John Hawkes, and I read about ten pages of that before I smelled the garbage can opening up.”

“Kathy has some opinions about books that she holds very dearly,” Aaron said. “It goes back to her activist days.”

“Which writers do you
like
?” Ruth asked.

“Emile Zola, J. D. Salinger, Mary McCarthy,” Kathy said without hesitation.

“I like James Michener’s books myself,” Abe said. “You read one of his books, you really feel like you’ve been somewhere.”

“The last book I really enjoyed was
Valley of the Dolls,
” Ruth said.

“I think I was in the fifth grade,” Aaron said. “And the teacher had a part of the bulletin board that she’d marked
reading for enjoyment.
I never quite knew what that meant.”

Kathy excused herself and went to the powder room to see if she could regroup her thoughts. The roll of toilet paper she found on the floor, in its own little basket. The hand towels had ribbons tied around them. Kathy sat down on the toilet and tinkled with a great pride of accomplishment.

She stood up feeling giddy. Merry images began to tumble through her mind. She pictured the Borises walking down the street naked, with only a couple of Abstract Expressionist “pictures” to cover them front and back, like advertisements for a greasy spoon. She imagined herself as an art critic, wheeling into a gallery a rack full of pies.

Wobbling a little, Kathy stepped into the foyer and was confronted by a track-lit canvas that was nothing more than smears of black and white with one splotch of red in it (had somebody thrown a tomato?). She walked up to the painting, which was the size of a shower curtain, made a face, and said, “Yuck!”

Then she turned and saw Ruth Boris in the doorway, with her bifocals lowered to the very tip of her nose.

Later, on the way home, Aaron did not have much to say.

Both he and Kathy knew that she had fucked up good.

But she’d enjoyed it, and obviously he hadn’t.

Once she got into bed, Kathy fell asleep immediately.

Then, at 3:00 A.M.,
the phone rang. Kathy somehow got her arm around to answering it. It was Melanie, and she was crying so that Kathy could hardly understand her. But the words came together.
Brett was dead.

Aaron only stirred once or twice while Kathy was talking to Melanie. After she’d hung up, Kathy lay there looking at her husband’s back for a long time. It seemed monumentally stupid to have spent the evening the way they had, a complete waste of time. Especially when they both knew full well what was important and what wasn’t.

You mustn’t ever forget what matters most,
Kathy thought. She put her arm around her sleeping husband, and she began to cry silently, for Melanie, her friend.

49

For most people the song “Rock the Boat” marked the beginning of the disco decade. For Mike, that brief era began a year after the record was popular, on the Sunday morning he first set foot on Fire Island. Now, as manager of the restaurant, he could choose his own hours, and he had chosen to give himself a long weekend every other week. That had enabled him to take a half share in a house in the Pines on Fire Island—the use of a bedroom on alternating weekends all summer long for six hundred dollars. Not a bargain, but not a bad deal either. The Pines wasn’t cheap.

Cherry Grove’s next-door neighbor, the Pines was a community of architectural statements addressing themselves to the beach in the modern vernacular of decks and sliding glass doors. Whereas the Grove was a bunch of beach shacks about as relaxed as the thongs worn by their owners.

Although the Grove had its own raffish appeal (part of its charm was the way it evoked gay life, circa 1958) Mike had decided that he preferred the Pines for its Bloomingdale’s-at-the-beach chic, its nouveau riche assertiveness, which, if it did nothing else, at least proved that however much gay power there was or wasn’t, there was a
lot
of gay money.

Fire Island was a mere spit of sand off Long Island, left like a fingerprint by the last ice age, and barely two city blocks wide. Fire Island was one long walk along the beach. It didn’t even have automobiles. Its thoroughfares were crooked boardwalks painted white along their edges so you wouldn’t tumble off them into the bushes at night.

The beach itself was magnificent, with sand like powdered sugar and tall, thick waves that broke right at your feet. Physically, Fire Island was enchanting. Another kind of physical enchantment was part of the place too. In the summer gay men went there looking for romance—or adventure. Or both. Mike, who though romantically inclined was realistic, said they came determined to score. The bars, the Blue Whale in the Pines and the Ice Palace in the Grove—were zoos of desire. Sex was always in the air, like the smell of suntan lotion. It was easy to get caught up in the whirl, to take advantage of the general availability, to forget that one day you would be back in your apartment in New York, with winter coming on, alone.

Mike had just about given up on the idea of having a long-term relationship anyway. With endless possibilities, why make any commitments? Most gay men seemed to think that way. They would take lovers for six months or a year, and then the lovers would become ex-lovers (specially designated friends), and the short growing season would begin again, come summer. After a while, Mike had begun to think,
Why bother even trying?
He’d have a lover the day he had a Tony.

Despite his personal disappointments, Mike truly loved the Pines, and there were afternoons during tea dance at the Blue Whale when he would just lounge against a railing taking it all in. The Cinzano umbrellas flapping in the breeze, the throng of oiled bodies, the yachts on the other side of the channel-sized harbor.

It was on one of these luxuriant afternoons, in August, that Mike saw not the new face everyone was looking for but a face he was sure he knew, altered a little, but still instantly recognizable—as the faces of people you’ve gone to school with always are. It was Eric, the kid who’d run off with Mr. Cherry. Without hesitating Mike walked up to him.

“Eric?” he said. “Is that you behind that suntan?”

“Mike?”

“What are
you
doing here?”

“I’m a houseguest,” said Eric. His voice was much more confident than it had been when they were in college, Mike noticed.

“That’s better than paying for it,” he said to Eric. “Are you living in the city now, or what?”

“No, I’m living in Philadelphia.”

“Are you still with Mr. Cherry?”

“Are you kidding? Live with Philadelphia
and
a sixty-year-old queen who smokes cigarettes in a holder? Please.”

“You two broke up, huh?”

“Five years ago.”

“So what are you doing in Philadelphia?”

“Arranging flowers. What are you doing in New York?”

“Managing a Greek restaurant. I no longer work for tips—except when I get an acting job once every two years.”