Chapter 1
The Present
“Amsterdam?” he asked. “I just bought my ticket.” The young man in Liverpool Street Station was going to the Continent too. He was draped across a bench and looked a bit haggard but seemed glad to welcome us, as if we had been friends back home. He smoothed the front of his wrinkled shirt and blinked languidly from loss of sleep and jet lag.
Three Americans on the road made small talk at an early hour, and then we parted, leaving him again to his bench. I called back, “See you on board.”
I turned and said to Mark, “I like the cut of his jib.”
“Whataya, a fuckin’ pirate, Max?”
“I live close to the sea. That makes me a romantic…”
Mark grumbled under his breath that a certain person ought to take a sailing ship and go hunt white whales. On our last day in London he had gotten grumpy…
If anyone should be annoyed, it should’ve been me. I couldn’t blame Mark for my last-minute decision to tour Europe. He already had his ticket. But the airlines had you over the old barrel for last-minute flights. I snagged a one-way charter ticket, at the “highwayman rate,” on RAT, Romanian Air Trans port. I got busy packing my gear with two days to leave. Scurrying to do final errands induced a whole range of possibilities to tickle my brain.
Instead of running to Roosevelt Field, I checked out our local store, Fisher’s Haberdashery. Hermann Fisher squinted when I walked in the door; the bell’s jangling had alerted him. He had big hairy ears and a bulbous nose. His thick eyeglasses with special imbedded smaller lenses made his eyes appear cartoonishly large. He was legally blind and came up close to peer at me, as if I would give off an identifying odor from this closeness. “Welcome, sonny boy,” he said. All the men were called sonny boy, until he knew who you were. When I spoke, he said, “Ah, Max, our local real estate magnate.”
“You know I sold out, so that’s not accurate anymore, Hermann.”
“Sold at the top! The rest of us have made bubkes.”
“What are you talking about? You own half the town.”
“My dear young shtarker, what’s half a load of shit worth? I’m too old to recoup. You’ll be back to buy at the bottom.
The old store was like a museum, with the original wood plank floors, fluted wooden pillars, and carvings on the walls. Hermann carried brandname closeouts and I found just what I needed in a lightweight safari jacket with pockets everywhere. “So, when is a strapping young man like you going to marry? You didn’t like my niece, Sarah?” Hermann had taken me by the collar, his playful way of acting tough, his face inches from mine, and his sour breath penetrating my nostrils.
“We didn’t hit it off,” I answered and left.
I showed the jacket to Mark and he said, “Nice.” This was going to be Mark’s pull-out-all-the-stops celebratory graduation tour, and he announced that we should go our separate ways on the Continent.
I concurred, because for one thing, I was older, and for another, we had different interests. He went to Fisher’s and got the same jacket.
“You couldn’t even find a different color?” I said.
Mark answered, “Nope!”
“Great, Markie, wearing matching jackets, the height of coolness!” I was leaving four days before him. But in London, when we were together I thought of us as Team Doofus with those jackets, so I figured I had more right to be grouchy than him.
Mark came from an orthodox background. He and his older brother, Larry, had each done their eight years in yeshiva. But Larry’s traditional upbringing wasn’t a hindrance to his becoming untrustworthy.
He had made trades for my stock account without my authorization. During a mad upswing in the market, I sold, took my lumps, chastened, and severed all ties with him. And Mark became my best friend by default.
The idea of friendship had become problematic. I had no women friends and didn’t care. Then there was the troubling time with Loren. Continually revisiting that period muted the stinging hurt. Mostly, I stayed reclusive, wishing to blame everything that had happened to an overactive sensitivity. My feelings were a trap that left me wondering what to do next.
I was on the run and would make a wide arc to faraway lands. I perceived the wonder of new possibilities that travel could bring, but also worried I might end up right back where I had started from unchanged, untouched…
The early morning meeting left me with thoughts of the young man at the railway ticket office: he was square shouldered, slim, and dark, probably of Mediterranean ancestry. His nose had a fine shape; I liked that. From our brief exchange, I sensed that he possessed a maturity beyond his twentytwo years, with an understated intelligence and modesty about his talents. He had majored in French and spoke Italian too. I got the impression that he didn’t like to thrust himself into the center of things or to seek attention…
Aboard the ship to the Hook of Holland, late into the night, he and I were below deck and talked at a little table. Pale lights shone in the lounge at the exits and passageways. I had never been on a ship before and neither had he. He was my companion in another kind of voyage. His mouth moved in a slow hypnotic motion, and the thrumming in my head formed an incongruous connection to the engine vibrations humming under our feet. The ship and the sea and the quiet in the dim cabin exaggerated a searching tension. Sleeping people and private whisperings nearby made the meeting more intimate. I thought his expression revealed an unspoken message that wanted to say, I like you. Finally, he said, “I must go. I’m completely useless, when I don’t get some sleep.” He got up from the chair and walked past me. When I turned seconds later to look for him, he had vanished into the dark…
He and I were together most of the summer. From the outset, we understood how to carefully tune into the other emotionally. We also adopted simple unspoken rules: neither of us mentioned the opposite sex, not the way that two guys in their twenties made their preferences known. He told me he had broken up with someone before graduation and that was that. During our travels, we stayed in student hostels and shared little rooms in pensions.
“Come, I know where we can go next,” he beckoned. We climbed a hill to the Pincio Gardens. It had been like this the whole trip; he led the way and I followed, drenched in his look and intellect right from the beginning, the day after the summer solstice.
We had a grand time. Even with the tension. There were delicious moments to gaze at him without seeming obvious, while my brain was steeped in visions of what could be. And the closeness—close enough to breathe in his musky scent after a day of roaming through Paris, the Luxembourg Gardens, and Montmartre. But I had had fun, seeing everything for the first time. And that first time had been with him…
* * *
Alone, the summer at an end, I stowed my backpack in the overhead compartment, plopped down in the aisle seat, and opened the book.
I had discovered that coincidence was more likely to occur than not. Sometimes unique notions become attached to completely ordinary comings and goings. I felt rejuvenated by happenstance and had formed ideas. To see them through, all that I lacked was nerve and a realistic plan.
“Amsterdam was the port of embarkation, a city with the largest and wealthiest middle class in the seventeenth century, the freest and most tolerant in Europe. The ships of this small nation of one and a half million competed with Spain and England for domination of trade across the seven seas. A young man hired on for the coast of North America. After a long journey he would labor as part of a great undertaking to build a settlement stick by stick and brick by brick.”
I laid the book down and nodded to my just arrived seat companion. He nodded back and winked too. He wasn’t an ordinary-looking guy. He made an impression, which gave me pause, and then I went back to my reading.
“…He and his mates viewed the horizon as they neared the New World… Soon the sea around them was dotted with canoes, filled with the inhabitants of a civilization so different from their own. There some four hundred years ago, the West India Company founded New Netherland.” I raised my eyes from the book.
“Interesting read?” he asked.
“Ah, yes,” I began a bit hesitantly. I’m never sure how much to say about a book, whether the inquirer is simply being polite. “It’s the story of the Dutch founding New Amsterdam.” I lapped up the irony of having begun a quest in Amsterdam, while carrying this book, and that I was reading the same book on the way home. Or there was no irony, just circumstances that I had forced into seeming ironical. I believed in reconstructing every event and element in my life. Every situation held multiple meanings to contend with.
A flight attendant was at the ready to lend a hand with his bag. He waved her off politely and smiled, showing a set of perfectly white teeth, and asked, “Does it have something new to say? I’ve found that many books rely on old sources, so you end up reading regurgitated material.”
“Actually yes, it has new things to say about the city I was born in.”
“I’m just a boy from the Midwest. Geoff Conrad. I guess we’re stuck with each other for the next nine hours.” He stuffed his bag into the overhead bin and then extended a hand so that my eyes locked on his crotch.
I glanced up at his comely features and shook his hand. “We don’t have much in the way of another option.” In these tight quarters, I felt it necessary to add, “But I’m friendly.”
“Me too, friendly enough, when it matters.” He jiggled as he sidled past me to the window seat, settled in, and began to rummage through his carry bag until he found a folder. He mumbled about having promised to read a friend’s play. “By the way—you didn’t tell me your name.”
“Max Bredman, a boy from the Bronx.” Perhaps he had thought that I couldn’t be bothered to give him my name. I picked up the book and waved it in front of him. “This history is based on thousands of archived pages that a scholar found in the New York State Library. The translations he did were a treasure trove of contracts, court cases, and documents. This shines a new light on New York’s origins as a place of diversity. Sorry for getting overly enthused—I don’t mean to bore you.”
“Not at all,” Geoff said. “I can see you’re a seeker—”
“I’ll plead guilty to being a history buff.”
“You can’t fool me. I’m under the impression that you like to delve into the heart of things,” he said with directness. When I picked up the book again, he looked away. The crew was going through safety and ocean ditching procedures.
“Next to nothing was known about the young Dutchman, except for a brief line in a ship’s log: Gerrit Barendtz, carpenter. The ship on which he arrived was ‘a large house of various colors’; Dutch boats of the time were painted in geometric motifs. It had been more than fifteen years since Henry Hudson sailed the Half Moon into ‘the grandness’ of Manna-hata harbor…”
My elementary school on Beekman Avenue was on the site of Jonas Bronck’s Farm. Our first-grade teacher, Miss Cornfield, had crinkled skin and snow-white hair worn swept-up onto the top of her head. She became animated, blue eyes twinkling, and spoke about Peter Stuyvesant, who stamped his peg leg on the plank floor at the British takeover of New Amsterdam, and then stood defiantly with his few followers on the ramparts that became the old Customs House opposite Battery Park. Her white blouse with its crenulated collar was always buttoned to the neck. The little lacy cuff fluttered when she threw her arm out to dramatize Stuyvesant’s fury at the “mongrel” populace for abandoning him in favor of English rule. We were awed and believed these stories came from her actual memories. Here in class our crayoned drawings of wooden shoes and cows and little gabled brick houses were tacked up around the room. I drew stick figures in brown crayon and made long slash lines in brown to enclose me and my colonists in their stockade settlement…
The engines roared and the huge craft barreled down the runway and lifted off, climbing steeply as it gained altitude, and coupled with this compelling upward movement was the shared fears of many that this could be the moment when consciousness blanked out. Or I would stare at the horrific breaking up of the cabin and then peer down incomprehensibly at the thousands of feet of space below, toward which we would be plummeting. That anxious thought in flight had its grip on me.
Compared to those wooden sailing ships of bygone days, we were the equivalent of aliens flying to earth from another planet. The great silver machine in which we rode the air currents belonged to a Dutch institution that might very well have sprung from antecedents of the West India Company. They took pride in providing the highest quality service to all their passengers, so that even here in steerage, we were given hot towels before being served a tasty chicken dinner with hard rolls and roomboter.
Chance had placed me next to this freewheeling young man in a double-seater at the back of the plane. Nature had endowed him with attributes that couldn’t be ignored. For one thing, he was an effervescent talker, which made me think of a fizzing medicine. Words bubbled forth, as if from a gurgling fountain. With the book in hand, I made sidelong glances to Geoff. He had an energetic curiosity, that kind of quick, bright wit that could challenge. At times, when I was about to speak, I’d look at him and think, He can read me.
After dinner, I allowed my seat companion to interrupt my reading with chitchat. I was overtired, but he lit up the place like blinking neon signs for the big attraction at a county fair. I stowed away my shield: the book. The experience of backpacking with recent college graduates had made me one of a fraternity separate from the regular tourists.
“Was this your after-graduation tour too?” he asked.
“Not for me. But it was for many of the others. I started out with my friend Mark. There was this guy, Ron, and then Chris.”
“Is Chris a girl?” he asked, making a funny twist with his lips, and his prominent eyes sparkled. He seemed to enjoy finding humor in anything.
“No. It’s Christopher. He had just graduated. Ron, he wasn’t a college graduate. He was a guy that liked his weed and his women.”
“Was he generous? Did he share his weed and women?”
“A couple of young women tagged along with us for a while,” I said.
“You make it sound like it was a bother, Max.”
“When I was with Mark in London, we met a couple of girls and went to see a revival of Man of La Mancha. They expected us to cater to them and carry their luggage. American girls are whiners! Later in our travels we met two other girls from home. We dumped them too.”
“You and Mark?”
“No, I was with Chris at that point. Mark had struck out on his own.”
“So you and Chris also found the ladies to be a bother?”
“Chris was just getting over a two-year relationship.”
“With a girl?”
“The person he described had breasts and a vagina.”
“I should’ve seen that coming.” He hugged himself and feigned embarrassment.
“To put it simply, I was of two minds about hanging out in Europe with the same type of women I could meet at home.”
“Then you and this Chris traveled together without female company?”
“Yeah!” I answered purposefully, though I intended to skimp on details.
“Isn’t it easier to travel with a guy than a girl? The idea of fulfilling
expectations is simpler,” he said vaguely.
“He’s going back to school for his master’s—a very levelheaded guy and a great travel buddy all the way from Amsterdam to Rome. But he had to return to the States before me, so I joined up again with Ron in Greece.”
“Ron sounds like a fun travel buddy.”
“It was scorching hot this summer, as you well know.”
“I was in Germany—in the north. It was bearable.”
I felt drawn to Geoff, comfortable and confident enough to talk about certain events. “Ron and I ended up in Israel. It was a hundred and ten degrees in Jerusalem—in the shade. One morning, we walked out of the hotel into the sunlight and sweat gushed from every pore, so we turned around, went back to our room, stripped, and put soaking towels on our bodies.”
“Sounds like you and Ron had a real scorcher.” He smirked, and then his tongue circled his lips, in an understated way, as if done unintentionally.
“Ron’s friend Darwin was with us.” I inserted the fact that a third person had joined our group.
Taking it as his cue, Geoff said, “Oh, a threesome. Was he related to Charles?” He laughed, getting a kick out of being purposely fatuous.
“I wouldn’t think so. That was his first name. I didn’t much care for him.”
“Not such a fun type or a good student like Chris?” He glanced at me sideways. “Did you also have second thoughts about Darwin?” Geoff Conrad was cocky, but he wasn’t confrontational; rather, his lightheartedness and harmless jousting put me at ease.
“Ya know how some people can grate on you—that was Darwin. He wanted to be seen as a nice guy, while being too much for numero uno, a taker.”
“But being of two minds, as you said, sounds like you’re faced with a decision,” he hinted softly. “You’re older than these new graduates, aren’t you?” He leapt sprightly into familiarity, but with sincerity in his voice.
“There’s plenty to be of two minds about in this crazy world. I’m twenty-seven. I’m not as smart as I was at eighteen.”
“Agreed. I’m twenty-six. Yeah, ten years ago, I was such a know-it-all. I told you before I did a bit part in a film. Acting is a touchy-feely vocation. You have to be up for anything and you have to go deep within yourself to give an authentic performance.” Geoff glossed his lips with his tongue, something he did frequently. He had a full head of sandy brown hair and bright gray eyes. Tight beige pants accentuated his muscular thighs; a fitted silk shirt clung hard to his pectorals. “I miss the simpler times of childhood. I didn’t have any worries. Remember when we were kids?” He made a suggestive smile. “We had good times in the Boy Scouts. Were you in the Scouts too?” I imagined us as child actors dressed as Scouts, ready to go before the cameras.
“My best friend joined, so I did. In the Catskills, we tramped through the woods, cooked canned beans in those famous aluminum kits, and read the handbook diligently. Now all I can remember is the motto ‘be prepared.’”
“Do you remember the stuff that used to go on?” he asked.
“Stuff happens. That covers a multitude of sins. What stuff do you mean?”
“Fun stuff. Boys like to fool around. Their natural curiosity with one another leads to sex.” He faked a coy smile and bumped my shoulder.
“I suppose it happens, though that wasn’t my experience.” I smiled back.
“Then what was your experience?” His gaze was steady and his eyes said Tell the truth. He was becoming impatient with my reserve, which was cramping his style. I was also curious to discover how candid he was ready to be.
“I bunked with a black kid. He was older, fourteen. He told me a story about wearing shorts in the summer and bustin’ out of his jock strap in front of some girls and they all screamed. Some such nonsense like that. He took out his enormous penis often. So his story could’ve been true.”
“Why do you think he took it out often?”
“I suppose to impress everyone and he must’ve been an exhibitionist, though I didn’t think anything of it at the time. As an eleven-year-old, I just thought he wanted to give it some air, like taking your dog out for a walk.”
“Yeah, a hot dog!” His exuberance drew me toward him, and I felt myself leaning, as if I might fall into his arms. “What else happened at camp?” Answer correctly, his face seemed to say, and you’ll win a prize.
“One other scene sticks in my head. A scoutmaster was with a bunch of us and asked everyone if we wanted to ‘take the test to see how fast you can strip.’ I don’t know what merit badge that covers. One fat kid stepped forward and, while twenty of us watched, the scoutmaster started his stopwatch and the kid stripped. He got down to his underwear and the scoutmaster, who was a real creep, said, ‘All the way.’ So the fat kid pulled down his underpants and the scoutmaster said, ‘We can work on this tonight. I’ll see you then.’”
“That’s what I’m getting at. We can’t stop the memory tape from replaying. I relish those memories, because they were my sexual beginnings.” Again, his tongue slid to the corner of his mouth, and circled it like the prelude to a kiss. His leg rubbed repeatedly against mine.
“I’ve discovered something about life,” he said. “Maybe, there are three basic personality types. The first group is in Nowheresville. The second, my category: we’ll try a lot of things, cuz life is for Doing! The third group, the Emergers, I see them like this: First, they’re afraid to look at themselves in the mirror. Later on, it dawns on them that others have similar thoughts. Finally, they realize, they’ve been wasting a lot of time. Are they ready to emerge?” He winked provocatively and laid a proprietary hand on mine. “I’d like you to do me a favor,” as though just struck with an idea. The thought popped into my head that I was about to volunteer for a part in a daring improvisational workshop. “I’m going to the lavatory.” He removed his hand from mine. “Wait exactly two minutes and then knock on the door.”
“For what reason?” I asked inanely.
“‘Applying Reason is the undoing of taking Action.’ Someone smart said that. You can’t be afraid. Jeez, you’re twice my size.”
I held up my bare wrists: “Am I to count to one hundred and twenty?”
“Easily rectified. A gift from an admirer to me,” he said, handing me the expensive watch.
I was giving in and became panicky for agreeing to take part. Loren had forced me to put up barriers. I saw this new scene playing out with the same shameful outcome and recalled every morsel of hostility that I had gobbled up like a mangy cur feeding on a shit pile.
“Two minutes.” He patted my shoulder and disappeared behind the door.
It was a full flight with more than three hundred passengers, in rows of three, four, and three. The awkwardness and marvel attached to my summer happenings fit the present circumstance thoroughly: the only two-seater in the last row, like the perfect prop in a stage set, seemed to have been ordered specifically for Geoff and me. There was also the convenient ponysized toilet feet away. Most people, fatigued or bored from the long flight, lay back in their seats. Others read or watched a film on the seat back’s little screen. My own film was more likely to reveal inadequacy than courage.
When I knocked on the door and said, “It’s Max,” the bolt was thrown.
He hustled me in to the oversized lavatory. Geoff was standing facing a mirror, pants and briefs down around his ankles, shirt wide open. He grinned when our eyes met. The tight muscles of his abdomen contracted, my eyes riveted on him. I felt my stomach drop and strength ebb away. His hand kept stroking. In the long side-mirrored wall, I saw the visual proof of my life-film.
He smiled broadly. “I’m almost there. Get me off. Pleease!”
He was positioned, standing over the toilet. Hesitantly, I held him around the waist. Holding tightly, I breathed in the tangy smell of his hair. I was hard against him, heart beating fast, bolted to the spot. In the mirror, he looked directly into my eyes with a weary, erotic glint. I met his gaze, my vision a blur with our faces touching; his eyes closed, facial lines tightened, and then convulsed, stomach muscles contracted, those muscular quadriceps stood up in a hard ridge and he ejaculated, pearly wads fell onto a cloth…I wanted to take hold of him, thick and warm, and to savor the physical contact. Instead, we were still, held like statues in an embrace for a long minute—reflective—sharing a fleeting intimacy…
“Sanitary napkins, good of them to supply ‘em,” he noted plainly. “I thought you might chicken out.”
I made a dopey smile, and flicked out my tongue close to his ear. Quickly he hoisted his pants and buttoned his shirt. Then he grinned lustfully and went for my belt buckle, but I blocked his hand. He turned away, went out the narrow opening. I closed the door, slid the bolt shut. The door itself opened like a regular door, unlike the others on the plane, that push-openin- the-center kind. Why had I fixated on the door? Alone, my head was bombarded with a jumble of images…
Returning to the seat, I handed the watch back to him, and he said, “Hi, Flesh Gordon.” I waved a hand in dismissal. Sunlight flooded the cabin and an aureole framed his head, as if he were for an instant in an abstract painting. Then the plane banked and the surreal light was deflected away from him.
“I’m glad you were there. I like big men. You shoulda let me get you off. I have to admit, I did pop an ‘X’ earlier. Makes it easier. Do I seem shallow?”
“I don’t find you shallow. You’re…outgoing.” Then his face suddenly went from jovial to somber. “Are you all right?”
“I guess I miss Hartmut. He’s big, like you,” he said thoughtfully. “I believed, maybe, you were ready.” He had begun to slur his words. “Hartmut, well, I knew him.” He pressed a small card into my hand. “Here’s where you can reach me. I don’t claim to know you.” The pretty gray eyes were glassy and he leaned drowsily into his seat. “There’s no exact diagnosis.”
“You don’t use astrological signs?” I said sarcastically.
“I told you, I like big men. I am a wee bit sleepy-shhh-...” He pressed back into the seat, eyes closed, and went silent. I didn’t know him, either. Maybe Hartmut was his lover. And he had articulated his unhappiness about missing him. I turned the card over in my hand. There was a phone number and a Brooklyn address, no name. I chalked up the no name to his being high, so I wrote it on the card before I slipped it into my pocket.
I tapped the little screen and began to watch a senseless film, having lost my concentration for reading. The movie was perfectly numbing and I slept through most of it. When I opened my eyes, he appeared sober.
“You slept like a baby. I was watching you. I like to watch a guy sleep,” he said without further elaboration.
I got up, went to the lavatory, and then walked around to stretch my legs, before I returned to the seat and Geoff.
Then he resumed in a steady and pleasant voice: “…Germany was fabulously boring and that’s why you meet the most jaded people there. I knew one old guy, a Bremen shipper, in his late forties, but he looked older, tried to keep up, to do everything. Begged me to stay with him. He never had a son, said he was lonely.” He nudged me with his arm, and repeated the tongue-lip circuit.
“Did you stay with him?” I wondered about his tongue circling. It intrigued me.
“That’s another story. He was strictly Debaucheryville. Truthfully, I knew someone who did stay with him, but he was high all the time. I have my standards, so don’t judge me,” he said without affectation and cracked an angelic smile.
“We’ve all made mistakes—I can’t judge you.”
“I’ve met some fine, older men too, extraordinary men. Hartmut knew I had to leave. I did bit parts in the theater in Bremen. They did Annie Get Your Gun—in German. It was fabelhaft! ‘There’s no business like show business.’ Even though I’ve been away three years, I think about being on Broadway. I can see my name on a theater marquee. Does that sound ridiculous?”
He turned and looked out the small window. If he circled his lips again, I missed the chance to catch him. He turned back to me. “A man once told me: ‘We meet the kind of people we’re looking for.’”
“I hope that man was right.”
He cocked his head inquisitively. “You’ve been playing Mr. Mystery.I bet you have some big secret. Back there in the lavatory, I think I could guess what it is.
“And?”
“It would confirm that everyone resorts to role-playing. When I get a guy naked, he’s on my turf,” he said confidently. “I can tell from the way someone responds, whether he is or isn’t. You cut me off before. That in itself is telling. What do you do?”
Strange associations that I believed held no meaning had become significant again. I adjusted my eyeglasses, pushed them flush to my forehead. Indeed, my body felt strangely changeable, as if I might metamorphose into a big naked toe. My clothes too were odd-feeling. And now he only expected that a simple question required a simple answer. “What I do is tied very closely to what I’ve done.”
“If you don’t feel like talking, hell, I won’t pry.”
“I chose the kind of work I do almost by serendipity, because of a friend.”
He dived right in: “More times than not we fall into our life’s work, when a friend recommends us for a job. The funny thing is that friend may no longer be in the picture.”
“Originally my friend moved in with me to a little beach house I bought on Long Island. That led me to buy three more houses as investments.” I paused. “That’s about as boring as it got.”
“You left out the sex.”
“There was none.”
“I never worried myself. I started doing it with boys and I haven’t looked back.”
“If you had spent a lot of your youth struggling with your fears, then you wouldn’t have felt so free,” I expounded like a self-help psychology book.
He tilted his head to study me. “Do you really like pussy? You might have done this on a lark, but you haven’t acted very carefree. I vote closeted.”
I coughed nervously, embarrassed, and tittered like a schoolgirl. “I try to seem sure in myself. I can see you aren’t very convinced that I am.” With Geoff, I had wanted to unburden myself, as people will do at times with a stranger.
“What about the story you’re dying to tell me?” he asked intuitively.
“What story?”
“Just to get something off your chest. To help lighten the load,” he answered reassuringly.
“May I plead the fifth?” I tried cheerful.
“I’d rather hear it from the horse’s mouth.”
“The horse says ‘Whinny.’ Perhaps Dobbins’ prospects have risen a bit since the beginning of the summer.”
“That’s a piece of a puzzle, isn’t it? Ah! You haven’t lost in love. You’ve found someone, haven’t you?” His eyes widened in triumph. “I bet it’s a guy.”
“We’re about to land.” My voice sounded hollow with a curt and dismissive ring. I hadn’t meant to be abrupt and was determined to make amends. We touched down, wheels thudded heavily on the runway, and the engines blasted in reverse, slowing the plane… to the gate.
Passengers reached for their cellphones and began removing their bags from the overhead compartments. He got up, stretched. I was standing too and handed him his jacket.
“We’ve had—an interesting flight,” I said, raising my voice. “I’m sure you’ll be a success in New York in all your endeavors,” intending to come across as ebullient and not as a hysteric.
“Three years. I can’t believe I’ve been away three whole years,” he said, announcing it to everyone within hearing, and eased into the aisle…
We had had an encounter, plain and simple. But we parted in the quite ordinary way two strangers would, who had been only seat companions on a long flight. I was put off by his air of detachment while we deplaned and then at baggage claim. He looked through me, I thought, rather than offer the kind of recognition our encounter deserved. Perhaps this was all he intended it to be, which to my mind made everything much less for what had happened.
That’s what I took away with me as I saw him step up to Customs businesslike and, without a nod to me, he passed through.
For the umpteenth time, I had succumbed to second-guessing myself and stifled spontaneity. Self-consciousness directed the many inconsistencies woven through me stitch by stitch until it became the suit that I had designed and perpetually wore.
A Fumbled Opportunity. I had compounded my failure with that cowardly refusal in the lavatory. I had probably sabotaged any chance to see him again…
Three Americans on the road made small talk at an early hour, and then we parted, leaving him again to his bench. I called back, “See you on board.”
I turned and said to Mark, “I like the cut of his jib.”
“Whataya, a fuckin’ pirate, Max?”
“I live close to the sea. That makes me a romantic…”
Mark grumbled under his breath that a certain person ought to take a sailing ship and go hunt white whales. On our last day in London he had gotten grumpy…
If anyone should be annoyed, it should’ve been me. I couldn’t blame Mark for my last-minute decision to tour Europe. He already had his ticket. But the airlines had you over the old barrel for last-minute flights. I snagged a one-way charter ticket, at the “highwayman rate,” on RAT, Romanian Air Trans port. I got busy packing my gear with two days to leave. Scurrying to do final errands induced a whole range of possibilities to tickle my brain.
Instead of running to Roosevelt Field, I checked out our local store, Fisher’s Haberdashery. Hermann Fisher squinted when I walked in the door; the bell’s jangling had alerted him. He had big hairy ears and a bulbous nose. His thick eyeglasses with special imbedded smaller lenses made his eyes appear cartoonishly large. He was legally blind and came up close to peer at me, as if I would give off an identifying odor from this closeness. “Welcome, sonny boy,” he said. All the men were called sonny boy, until he knew who you were. When I spoke, he said, “Ah, Max, our local real estate magnate.”
“You know I sold out, so that’s not accurate anymore, Hermann.”
“Sold at the top! The rest of us have made bubkes.”
“What are you talking about? You own half the town.”
“My dear young shtarker, what’s half a load of shit worth? I’m too old to recoup. You’ll be back to buy at the bottom.
The old store was like a museum, with the original wood plank floors, fluted wooden pillars, and carvings on the walls. Hermann carried brandname closeouts and I found just what I needed in a lightweight safari jacket with pockets everywhere. “So, when is a strapping young man like you going to marry? You didn’t like my niece, Sarah?” Hermann had taken me by the collar, his playful way of acting tough, his face inches from mine, and his sour breath penetrating my nostrils.
“We didn’t hit it off,” I answered and left.
I showed the jacket to Mark and he said, “Nice.” This was going to be Mark’s pull-out-all-the-stops celebratory graduation tour, and he announced that we should go our separate ways on the Continent.
I concurred, because for one thing, I was older, and for another, we had different interests. He went to Fisher’s and got the same jacket.
“You couldn’t even find a different color?” I said.
Mark answered, “Nope!”
“Great, Markie, wearing matching jackets, the height of coolness!” I was leaving four days before him. But in London, when we were together I thought of us as Team Doofus with those jackets, so I figured I had more right to be grouchy than him.
Mark came from an orthodox background. He and his older brother, Larry, had each done their eight years in yeshiva. But Larry’s traditional upbringing wasn’t a hindrance to his becoming untrustworthy.
He had made trades for my stock account without my authorization. During a mad upswing in the market, I sold, took my lumps, chastened, and severed all ties with him. And Mark became my best friend by default.
The idea of friendship had become problematic. I had no women friends and didn’t care. Then there was the troubling time with Loren. Continually revisiting that period muted the stinging hurt. Mostly, I stayed reclusive, wishing to blame everything that had happened to an overactive sensitivity. My feelings were a trap that left me wondering what to do next.
I was on the run and would make a wide arc to faraway lands. I perceived the wonder of new possibilities that travel could bring, but also worried I might end up right back where I had started from unchanged, untouched…
The early morning meeting left me with thoughts of the young man at the railway ticket office: he was square shouldered, slim, and dark, probably of Mediterranean ancestry. His nose had a fine shape; I liked that. From our brief exchange, I sensed that he possessed a maturity beyond his twentytwo years, with an understated intelligence and modesty about his talents. He had majored in French and spoke Italian too. I got the impression that he didn’t like to thrust himself into the center of things or to seek attention…
Aboard the ship to the Hook of Holland, late into the night, he and I were below deck and talked at a little table. Pale lights shone in the lounge at the exits and passageways. I had never been on a ship before and neither had he. He was my companion in another kind of voyage. His mouth moved in a slow hypnotic motion, and the thrumming in my head formed an incongruous connection to the engine vibrations humming under our feet. The ship and the sea and the quiet in the dim cabin exaggerated a searching tension. Sleeping people and private whisperings nearby made the meeting more intimate. I thought his expression revealed an unspoken message that wanted to say, I like you. Finally, he said, “I must go. I’m completely useless, when I don’t get some sleep.” He got up from the chair and walked past me. When I turned seconds later to look for him, he had vanished into the dark…
He and I were together most of the summer. From the outset, we understood how to carefully tune into the other emotionally. We also adopted simple unspoken rules: neither of us mentioned the opposite sex, not the way that two guys in their twenties made their preferences known. He told me he had broken up with someone before graduation and that was that. During our travels, we stayed in student hostels and shared little rooms in pensions.
“Come, I know where we can go next,” he beckoned. We climbed a hill to the Pincio Gardens. It had been like this the whole trip; he led the way and I followed, drenched in his look and intellect right from the beginning, the day after the summer solstice.
We had a grand time. Even with the tension. There were delicious moments to gaze at him without seeming obvious, while my brain was steeped in visions of what could be. And the closeness—close enough to breathe in his musky scent after a day of roaming through Paris, the Luxembourg Gardens, and Montmartre. But I had had fun, seeing everything for the first time. And that first time had been with him…
* * *
Alone, the summer at an end, I stowed my backpack in the overhead compartment, plopped down in the aisle seat, and opened the book.
I had discovered that coincidence was more likely to occur than not. Sometimes unique notions become attached to completely ordinary comings and goings. I felt rejuvenated by happenstance and had formed ideas. To see them through, all that I lacked was nerve and a realistic plan.
“Amsterdam was the port of embarkation, a city with the largest and wealthiest middle class in the seventeenth century, the freest and most tolerant in Europe. The ships of this small nation of one and a half million competed with Spain and England for domination of trade across the seven seas. A young man hired on for the coast of North America. After a long journey he would labor as part of a great undertaking to build a settlement stick by stick and brick by brick.”
I laid the book down and nodded to my just arrived seat companion. He nodded back and winked too. He wasn’t an ordinary-looking guy. He made an impression, which gave me pause, and then I went back to my reading.
“…He and his mates viewed the horizon as they neared the New World… Soon the sea around them was dotted with canoes, filled with the inhabitants of a civilization so different from their own. There some four hundred years ago, the West India Company founded New Netherland.” I raised my eyes from the book.
“Interesting read?” he asked.
“Ah, yes,” I began a bit hesitantly. I’m never sure how much to say about a book, whether the inquirer is simply being polite. “It’s the story of the Dutch founding New Amsterdam.” I lapped up the irony of having begun a quest in Amsterdam, while carrying this book, and that I was reading the same book on the way home. Or there was no irony, just circumstances that I had forced into seeming ironical. I believed in reconstructing every event and element in my life. Every situation held multiple meanings to contend with.
A flight attendant was at the ready to lend a hand with his bag. He waved her off politely and smiled, showing a set of perfectly white teeth, and asked, “Does it have something new to say? I’ve found that many books rely on old sources, so you end up reading regurgitated material.”
“Actually yes, it has new things to say about the city I was born in.”
“I’m just a boy from the Midwest. Geoff Conrad. I guess we’re stuck with each other for the next nine hours.” He stuffed his bag into the overhead bin and then extended a hand so that my eyes locked on his crotch.
I glanced up at his comely features and shook his hand. “We don’t have much in the way of another option.” In these tight quarters, I felt it necessary to add, “But I’m friendly.”
“Me too, friendly enough, when it matters.” He jiggled as he sidled past me to the window seat, settled in, and began to rummage through his carry bag until he found a folder. He mumbled about having promised to read a friend’s play. “By the way—you didn’t tell me your name.”
“Max Bredman, a boy from the Bronx.” Perhaps he had thought that I couldn’t be bothered to give him my name. I picked up the book and waved it in front of him. “This history is based on thousands of archived pages that a scholar found in the New York State Library. The translations he did were a treasure trove of contracts, court cases, and documents. This shines a new light on New York’s origins as a place of diversity. Sorry for getting overly enthused—I don’t mean to bore you.”
“Not at all,” Geoff said. “I can see you’re a seeker—”
“I’ll plead guilty to being a history buff.”
“You can’t fool me. I’m under the impression that you like to delve into the heart of things,” he said with directness. When I picked up the book again, he looked away. The crew was going through safety and ocean ditching procedures.
“Next to nothing was known about the young Dutchman, except for a brief line in a ship’s log: Gerrit Barendtz, carpenter. The ship on which he arrived was ‘a large house of various colors’; Dutch boats of the time were painted in geometric motifs. It had been more than fifteen years since Henry Hudson sailed the Half Moon into ‘the grandness’ of Manna-hata harbor…”
My elementary school on Beekman Avenue was on the site of Jonas Bronck’s Farm. Our first-grade teacher, Miss Cornfield, had crinkled skin and snow-white hair worn swept-up onto the top of her head. She became animated, blue eyes twinkling, and spoke about Peter Stuyvesant, who stamped his peg leg on the plank floor at the British takeover of New Amsterdam, and then stood defiantly with his few followers on the ramparts that became the old Customs House opposite Battery Park. Her white blouse with its crenulated collar was always buttoned to the neck. The little lacy cuff fluttered when she threw her arm out to dramatize Stuyvesant’s fury at the “mongrel” populace for abandoning him in favor of English rule. We were awed and believed these stories came from her actual memories. Here in class our crayoned drawings of wooden shoes and cows and little gabled brick houses were tacked up around the room. I drew stick figures in brown crayon and made long slash lines in brown to enclose me and my colonists in their stockade settlement…
The engines roared and the huge craft barreled down the runway and lifted off, climbing steeply as it gained altitude, and coupled with this compelling upward movement was the shared fears of many that this could be the moment when consciousness blanked out. Or I would stare at the horrific breaking up of the cabin and then peer down incomprehensibly at the thousands of feet of space below, toward which we would be plummeting. That anxious thought in flight had its grip on me.
Compared to those wooden sailing ships of bygone days, we were the equivalent of aliens flying to earth from another planet. The great silver machine in which we rode the air currents belonged to a Dutch institution that might very well have sprung from antecedents of the West India Company. They took pride in providing the highest quality service to all their passengers, so that even here in steerage, we were given hot towels before being served a tasty chicken dinner with hard rolls and roomboter.
Chance had placed me next to this freewheeling young man in a double-seater at the back of the plane. Nature had endowed him with attributes that couldn’t be ignored. For one thing, he was an effervescent talker, which made me think of a fizzing medicine. Words bubbled forth, as if from a gurgling fountain. With the book in hand, I made sidelong glances to Geoff. He had an energetic curiosity, that kind of quick, bright wit that could challenge. At times, when I was about to speak, I’d look at him and think, He can read me.
After dinner, I allowed my seat companion to interrupt my reading with chitchat. I was overtired, but he lit up the place like blinking neon signs for the big attraction at a county fair. I stowed away my shield: the book. The experience of backpacking with recent college graduates had made me one of a fraternity separate from the regular tourists.
“Was this your after-graduation tour too?” he asked.
“Not for me. But it was for many of the others. I started out with my friend Mark. There was this guy, Ron, and then Chris.”
“Is Chris a girl?” he asked, making a funny twist with his lips, and his prominent eyes sparkled. He seemed to enjoy finding humor in anything.
“No. It’s Christopher. He had just graduated. Ron, he wasn’t a college graduate. He was a guy that liked his weed and his women.”
“Was he generous? Did he share his weed and women?”
“A couple of young women tagged along with us for a while,” I said.
“You make it sound like it was a bother, Max.”
“When I was with Mark in London, we met a couple of girls and went to see a revival of Man of La Mancha. They expected us to cater to them and carry their luggage. American girls are whiners! Later in our travels we met two other girls from home. We dumped them too.”
“You and Mark?”
“No, I was with Chris at that point. Mark had struck out on his own.”
“So you and Chris also found the ladies to be a bother?”
“Chris was just getting over a two-year relationship.”
“With a girl?”
“The person he described had breasts and a vagina.”
“I should’ve seen that coming.” He hugged himself and feigned embarrassment.
“To put it simply, I was of two minds about hanging out in Europe with the same type of women I could meet at home.”
“Then you and this Chris traveled together without female company?”
“Yeah!” I answered purposefully, though I intended to skimp on details.
“Isn’t it easier to travel with a guy than a girl? The idea of fulfilling
expectations is simpler,” he said vaguely.
“He’s going back to school for his master’s—a very levelheaded guy and a great travel buddy all the way from Amsterdam to Rome. But he had to return to the States before me, so I joined up again with Ron in Greece.”
“Ron sounds like a fun travel buddy.”
“It was scorching hot this summer, as you well know.”
“I was in Germany—in the north. It was bearable.”
I felt drawn to Geoff, comfortable and confident enough to talk about certain events. “Ron and I ended up in Israel. It was a hundred and ten degrees in Jerusalem—in the shade. One morning, we walked out of the hotel into the sunlight and sweat gushed from every pore, so we turned around, went back to our room, stripped, and put soaking towels on our bodies.”
“Sounds like you and Ron had a real scorcher.” He smirked, and then his tongue circled his lips, in an understated way, as if done unintentionally.
“Ron’s friend Darwin was with us.” I inserted the fact that a third person had joined our group.
Taking it as his cue, Geoff said, “Oh, a threesome. Was he related to Charles?” He laughed, getting a kick out of being purposely fatuous.
“I wouldn’t think so. That was his first name. I didn’t much care for him.”
“Not such a fun type or a good student like Chris?” He glanced at me sideways. “Did you also have second thoughts about Darwin?” Geoff Conrad was cocky, but he wasn’t confrontational; rather, his lightheartedness and harmless jousting put me at ease.
“Ya know how some people can grate on you—that was Darwin. He wanted to be seen as a nice guy, while being too much for numero uno, a taker.”
“But being of two minds, as you said, sounds like you’re faced with a decision,” he hinted softly. “You’re older than these new graduates, aren’t you?” He leapt sprightly into familiarity, but with sincerity in his voice.
“There’s plenty to be of two minds about in this crazy world. I’m twenty-seven. I’m not as smart as I was at eighteen.”
“Agreed. I’m twenty-six. Yeah, ten years ago, I was such a know-it-all. I told you before I did a bit part in a film. Acting is a touchy-feely vocation. You have to be up for anything and you have to go deep within yourself to give an authentic performance.” Geoff glossed his lips with his tongue, something he did frequently. He had a full head of sandy brown hair and bright gray eyes. Tight beige pants accentuated his muscular thighs; a fitted silk shirt clung hard to his pectorals. “I miss the simpler times of childhood. I didn’t have any worries. Remember when we were kids?” He made a suggestive smile. “We had good times in the Boy Scouts. Were you in the Scouts too?” I imagined us as child actors dressed as Scouts, ready to go before the cameras.
“My best friend joined, so I did. In the Catskills, we tramped through the woods, cooked canned beans in those famous aluminum kits, and read the handbook diligently. Now all I can remember is the motto ‘be prepared.’”
“Do you remember the stuff that used to go on?” he asked.
“Stuff happens. That covers a multitude of sins. What stuff do you mean?”
“Fun stuff. Boys like to fool around. Their natural curiosity with one another leads to sex.” He faked a coy smile and bumped my shoulder.
“I suppose it happens, though that wasn’t my experience.” I smiled back.
“Then what was your experience?” His gaze was steady and his eyes said Tell the truth. He was becoming impatient with my reserve, which was cramping his style. I was also curious to discover how candid he was ready to be.
“I bunked with a black kid. He was older, fourteen. He told me a story about wearing shorts in the summer and bustin’ out of his jock strap in front of some girls and they all screamed. Some such nonsense like that. He took out his enormous penis often. So his story could’ve been true.”
“Why do you think he took it out often?”
“I suppose to impress everyone and he must’ve been an exhibitionist, though I didn’t think anything of it at the time. As an eleven-year-old, I just thought he wanted to give it some air, like taking your dog out for a walk.”
“Yeah, a hot dog!” His exuberance drew me toward him, and I felt myself leaning, as if I might fall into his arms. “What else happened at camp?” Answer correctly, his face seemed to say, and you’ll win a prize.
“One other scene sticks in my head. A scoutmaster was with a bunch of us and asked everyone if we wanted to ‘take the test to see how fast you can strip.’ I don’t know what merit badge that covers. One fat kid stepped forward and, while twenty of us watched, the scoutmaster started his stopwatch and the kid stripped. He got down to his underwear and the scoutmaster, who was a real creep, said, ‘All the way.’ So the fat kid pulled down his underpants and the scoutmaster said, ‘We can work on this tonight. I’ll see you then.’”
“That’s what I’m getting at. We can’t stop the memory tape from replaying. I relish those memories, because they were my sexual beginnings.” Again, his tongue slid to the corner of his mouth, and circled it like the prelude to a kiss. His leg rubbed repeatedly against mine.
“I’ve discovered something about life,” he said. “Maybe, there are three basic personality types. The first group is in Nowheresville. The second, my category: we’ll try a lot of things, cuz life is for Doing! The third group, the Emergers, I see them like this: First, they’re afraid to look at themselves in the mirror. Later on, it dawns on them that others have similar thoughts. Finally, they realize, they’ve been wasting a lot of time. Are they ready to emerge?” He winked provocatively and laid a proprietary hand on mine. “I’d like you to do me a favor,” as though just struck with an idea. The thought popped into my head that I was about to volunteer for a part in a daring improvisational workshop. “I’m going to the lavatory.” He removed his hand from mine. “Wait exactly two minutes and then knock on the door.”
“For what reason?” I asked inanely.
“‘Applying Reason is the undoing of taking Action.’ Someone smart said that. You can’t be afraid. Jeez, you’re twice my size.”
I held up my bare wrists: “Am I to count to one hundred and twenty?”
“Easily rectified. A gift from an admirer to me,” he said, handing me the expensive watch.
I was giving in and became panicky for agreeing to take part. Loren had forced me to put up barriers. I saw this new scene playing out with the same shameful outcome and recalled every morsel of hostility that I had gobbled up like a mangy cur feeding on a shit pile.
“Two minutes.” He patted my shoulder and disappeared behind the door.
It was a full flight with more than three hundred passengers, in rows of three, four, and three. The awkwardness and marvel attached to my summer happenings fit the present circumstance thoroughly: the only two-seater in the last row, like the perfect prop in a stage set, seemed to have been ordered specifically for Geoff and me. There was also the convenient ponysized toilet feet away. Most people, fatigued or bored from the long flight, lay back in their seats. Others read or watched a film on the seat back’s little screen. My own film was more likely to reveal inadequacy than courage.
When I knocked on the door and said, “It’s Max,” the bolt was thrown.
He hustled me in to the oversized lavatory. Geoff was standing facing a mirror, pants and briefs down around his ankles, shirt wide open. He grinned when our eyes met. The tight muscles of his abdomen contracted, my eyes riveted on him. I felt my stomach drop and strength ebb away. His hand kept stroking. In the long side-mirrored wall, I saw the visual proof of my life-film.
He smiled broadly. “I’m almost there. Get me off. Pleease!”
He was positioned, standing over the toilet. Hesitantly, I held him around the waist. Holding tightly, I breathed in the tangy smell of his hair. I was hard against him, heart beating fast, bolted to the spot. In the mirror, he looked directly into my eyes with a weary, erotic glint. I met his gaze, my vision a blur with our faces touching; his eyes closed, facial lines tightened, and then convulsed, stomach muscles contracted, those muscular quadriceps stood up in a hard ridge and he ejaculated, pearly wads fell onto a cloth…I wanted to take hold of him, thick and warm, and to savor the physical contact. Instead, we were still, held like statues in an embrace for a long minute—reflective—sharing a fleeting intimacy…
“Sanitary napkins, good of them to supply ‘em,” he noted plainly. “I thought you might chicken out.”
I made a dopey smile, and flicked out my tongue close to his ear. Quickly he hoisted his pants and buttoned his shirt. Then he grinned lustfully and went for my belt buckle, but I blocked his hand. He turned away, went out the narrow opening. I closed the door, slid the bolt shut. The door itself opened like a regular door, unlike the others on the plane, that push-openin- the-center kind. Why had I fixated on the door? Alone, my head was bombarded with a jumble of images…
Returning to the seat, I handed the watch back to him, and he said, “Hi, Flesh Gordon.” I waved a hand in dismissal. Sunlight flooded the cabin and an aureole framed his head, as if he were for an instant in an abstract painting. Then the plane banked and the surreal light was deflected away from him.
“I’m glad you were there. I like big men. You shoulda let me get you off. I have to admit, I did pop an ‘X’ earlier. Makes it easier. Do I seem shallow?”
“I don’t find you shallow. You’re…outgoing.” Then his face suddenly went from jovial to somber. “Are you all right?”
“I guess I miss Hartmut. He’s big, like you,” he said thoughtfully. “I believed, maybe, you were ready.” He had begun to slur his words. “Hartmut, well, I knew him.” He pressed a small card into my hand. “Here’s where you can reach me. I don’t claim to know you.” The pretty gray eyes were glassy and he leaned drowsily into his seat. “There’s no exact diagnosis.”
“You don’t use astrological signs?” I said sarcastically.
“I told you, I like big men. I am a wee bit sleepy-shhh-...” He pressed back into the seat, eyes closed, and went silent. I didn’t know him, either. Maybe Hartmut was his lover. And he had articulated his unhappiness about missing him. I turned the card over in my hand. There was a phone number and a Brooklyn address, no name. I chalked up the no name to his being high, so I wrote it on the card before I slipped it into my pocket.
I tapped the little screen and began to watch a senseless film, having lost my concentration for reading. The movie was perfectly numbing and I slept through most of it. When I opened my eyes, he appeared sober.
“You slept like a baby. I was watching you. I like to watch a guy sleep,” he said without further elaboration.
I got up, went to the lavatory, and then walked around to stretch my legs, before I returned to the seat and Geoff.
Then he resumed in a steady and pleasant voice: “…Germany was fabulously boring and that’s why you meet the most jaded people there. I knew one old guy, a Bremen shipper, in his late forties, but he looked older, tried to keep up, to do everything. Begged me to stay with him. He never had a son, said he was lonely.” He nudged me with his arm, and repeated the tongue-lip circuit.
“Did you stay with him?” I wondered about his tongue circling. It intrigued me.
“That’s another story. He was strictly Debaucheryville. Truthfully, I knew someone who did stay with him, but he was high all the time. I have my standards, so don’t judge me,” he said without affectation and cracked an angelic smile.
“We’ve all made mistakes—I can’t judge you.”
“I’ve met some fine, older men too, extraordinary men. Hartmut knew I had to leave. I did bit parts in the theater in Bremen. They did Annie Get Your Gun—in German. It was fabelhaft! ‘There’s no business like show business.’ Even though I’ve been away three years, I think about being on Broadway. I can see my name on a theater marquee. Does that sound ridiculous?”
He turned and looked out the small window. If he circled his lips again, I missed the chance to catch him. He turned back to me. “A man once told me: ‘We meet the kind of people we’re looking for.’”
“I hope that man was right.”
He cocked his head inquisitively. “You’ve been playing Mr. Mystery.I bet you have some big secret. Back there in the lavatory, I think I could guess what it is.
“And?”
“It would confirm that everyone resorts to role-playing. When I get a guy naked, he’s on my turf,” he said confidently. “I can tell from the way someone responds, whether he is or isn’t. You cut me off before. That in itself is telling. What do you do?”
Strange associations that I believed held no meaning had become significant again. I adjusted my eyeglasses, pushed them flush to my forehead. Indeed, my body felt strangely changeable, as if I might metamorphose into a big naked toe. My clothes too were odd-feeling. And now he only expected that a simple question required a simple answer. “What I do is tied very closely to what I’ve done.”
“If you don’t feel like talking, hell, I won’t pry.”
“I chose the kind of work I do almost by serendipity, because of a friend.”
He dived right in: “More times than not we fall into our life’s work, when a friend recommends us for a job. The funny thing is that friend may no longer be in the picture.”
“Originally my friend moved in with me to a little beach house I bought on Long Island. That led me to buy three more houses as investments.” I paused. “That’s about as boring as it got.”
“You left out the sex.”
“There was none.”
“I never worried myself. I started doing it with boys and I haven’t looked back.”
“If you had spent a lot of your youth struggling with your fears, then you wouldn’t have felt so free,” I expounded like a self-help psychology book.
He tilted his head to study me. “Do you really like pussy? You might have done this on a lark, but you haven’t acted very carefree. I vote closeted.”
I coughed nervously, embarrassed, and tittered like a schoolgirl. “I try to seem sure in myself. I can see you aren’t very convinced that I am.” With Geoff, I had wanted to unburden myself, as people will do at times with a stranger.
“What about the story you’re dying to tell me?” he asked intuitively.
“What story?”
“Just to get something off your chest. To help lighten the load,” he answered reassuringly.
“May I plead the fifth?” I tried cheerful.
“I’d rather hear it from the horse’s mouth.”
“The horse says ‘Whinny.’ Perhaps Dobbins’ prospects have risen a bit since the beginning of the summer.”
“That’s a piece of a puzzle, isn’t it? Ah! You haven’t lost in love. You’ve found someone, haven’t you?” His eyes widened in triumph. “I bet it’s a guy.”
“We’re about to land.” My voice sounded hollow with a curt and dismissive ring. I hadn’t meant to be abrupt and was determined to make amends. We touched down, wheels thudded heavily on the runway, and the engines blasted in reverse, slowing the plane… to the gate.
Passengers reached for their cellphones and began removing their bags from the overhead compartments. He got up, stretched. I was standing too and handed him his jacket.
“We’ve had—an interesting flight,” I said, raising my voice. “I’m sure you’ll be a success in New York in all your endeavors,” intending to come across as ebullient and not as a hysteric.
“Three years. I can’t believe I’ve been away three whole years,” he said, announcing it to everyone within hearing, and eased into the aisle…
We had had an encounter, plain and simple. But we parted in the quite ordinary way two strangers would, who had been only seat companions on a long flight. I was put off by his air of detachment while we deplaned and then at baggage claim. He looked through me, I thought, rather than offer the kind of recognition our encounter deserved. Perhaps this was all he intended it to be, which to my mind made everything much less for what had happened.
That’s what I took away with me as I saw him step up to Customs businesslike and, without a nod to me, he passed through.
For the umpteenth time, I had succumbed to second-guessing myself and stifled spontaneity. Self-consciousness directed the many inconsistencies woven through me stitch by stitch until it became the suit that I had designed and perpetually wore.
A Fumbled Opportunity. I had compounded my failure with that cowardly refusal in the lavatory. I had probably sabotaged any chance to see him again…
It had been unseasonably hot in London on the summer solstice when Mark Golding had flown in from New York to join me. Blistering heat rose from the streets and stone. The weather was the news. The English weren’t used to it this hot. We trudged with the others; I was only too glad that our safari jackets became unnecessary. Young people sat ringed around the famous fountains, unmindful, dipping their naked feet in the pigeon water.
Coincidence can challenge at the oddest time and occur because something happens we believe to be impossible. I had decided not to keep my promise to go back to the green room, where, two nights ago, I was with an Englishman named Brian. We ran into Brian on the street. What are the odds of meeting like that in the middle of a bustling city, where a step either way, seconds apart even on the same street, would have meant missing each other?
I had given in to the urge to test myself in a foreign place, and yet, I would still cling to denial rather than admit I had reached a point of no return. I would protect my hiding place and keep it secret. But my head heard the truth in a trumpet fanfare. And Brian had the power to blast those trumpets in my face and blow apart my whole House-of-Cards life.
My stomach in knots, I had screwed up my nerve and gone down the concrete steps into the dank-smelling green room, where I ordered a cider and tried to act at ease. In those first nervous minutes, I thought everyone scrutinized me as if a freak in a sideshow. It was my first time. Music played, guys danced. Someone bumped against me at the bar. Brian was a slim kid with a pleasant look. He was friendly and asked me to dance. I tried but couldn’t dance very well. He laughed, not in a mean way, rather good-naturedly. I told him I liked his English accent and he said he liked my Yankee one.
“Ya got a Yankee one?” he shouted above the booming music. And I yelled back, asking him what he meant. “You Yanks are usually cut.” The backroom was a good place to compare the difference.
Desire was my companion as Brian led the way, past men in the light and shadow of their entangled bodies. It was desire that caused me to tremble with fear and excitement.
“How are we going to do this?” I asked dumbly. We were alone, under a dim spotlight, and away from the mass of orgy lovers, as if set apart in a Queers-in-Training section.
“Why don’t we drop our trousers at the same time?” Brian’s lewd smile played like a lute’s innocent note to his boyish charm. Then he reached out and took me in his hand and went down on his knees. Afterward, I felt my legs buckle as I kneeled down. My hand shook as I took hold of him. He said: ‘It’s OK, mate. We’re all friends here and patted my head with affection. He was such a nice kid, knowing that we had no future, because I was a visitor. But maybe that was all he wanted. I wished there could’ve been more, an emotional tie. I told him I would see him the following night…
Coincidence can challenge at the oddest time and occur because something happens we believe to be impossible. I had decided not to keep my promise to go back to the green room, where, two nights ago, I was with an Englishman named Brian. We ran into Brian on the street. What are the odds of meeting like that in the middle of a bustling city, where a step either way, seconds apart even on the same street, would have meant missing each other?
I had given in to the urge to test myself in a foreign place, and yet, I would still cling to denial rather than admit I had reached a point of no return. I would protect my hiding place and keep it secret. But my head heard the truth in a trumpet fanfare. And Brian had the power to blast those trumpets in my face and blow apart my whole House-of-Cards life.
My stomach in knots, I had screwed up my nerve and gone down the concrete steps into the dank-smelling green room, where I ordered a cider and tried to act at ease. In those first nervous minutes, I thought everyone scrutinized me as if a freak in a sideshow. It was my first time. Music played, guys danced. Someone bumped against me at the bar. Brian was a slim kid with a pleasant look. He was friendly and asked me to dance. I tried but couldn’t dance very well. He laughed, not in a mean way, rather good-naturedly. I told him I liked his English accent and he said he liked my Yankee one.
“Ya got a Yankee one?” he shouted above the booming music. And I yelled back, asking him what he meant. “You Yanks are usually cut.” The backroom was a good place to compare the difference.
Desire was my companion as Brian led the way, past men in the light and shadow of their entangled bodies. It was desire that caused me to tremble with fear and excitement.
“How are we going to do this?” I asked dumbly. We were alone, under a dim spotlight, and away from the mass of orgy lovers, as if set apart in a Queers-in-Training section.
“Why don’t we drop our trousers at the same time?” Brian’s lewd smile played like a lute’s innocent note to his boyish charm. Then he reached out and took me in his hand and went down on his knees. Afterward, I felt my legs buckle as I kneeled down. My hand shook as I took hold of him. He said: ‘It’s OK, mate. We’re all friends here and patted my head with affection. He was such a nice kid, knowing that we had no future, because I was a visitor. But maybe that was all he wanted. I wished there could’ve been more, an emotional tie. I told him I would see him the following night…
“Ah, this is the bloke, I was tellin’ you ‘bout,” said Brian to his friend.
I introduced Brian as a guy I had met at a club. Mark wanted to know about the place, wanted to know where the girls were.
“I wouldn’t say there were girls at the club,” Brian said, to make me squirm.
“Weeknight,” I said weakly. “I had a cider.”
“We oughta try it tonight,” said Mark.
“It would be an eye-opener for you,” Brian said. I certainly deserved that.
Then his face broke into a big, knowing smile. I looked away and cringed. “Here we are at Oxford Circus. We were meant to meet! We can’t let this occasion slip away. And we can’t stay out in this heat. I know a pub—it’s not far.”
I was filled with the certainty that my hiding place was about to be exposed. As we entered the dark confines of the timbered-ceiling pub, a few of the regulars, just off work, had dropped in for their early pint and I heard the “darlings” dribbled over one another, and of course, Mark heard them too. Was I finally going to declare? Brian and his friend were hailed and chirped in return, “Hello, dear thing,” to one of the cute boys.
It was thumping through me, Just get it over with and blurt it out. Mark had a curious look. I thought, If I had lived in Nazi Germany, I’d be wearing a pink triangle. Finally, I said, “You know the place the other night was different from this one, there was dancing.”
“I didn’t know you danced, Maxey,” said Mark.
“I don’t very well. Brian can attest to that,” I said, ready for the blow to come.
“So, there were girls at the club!” Mark surmised, beaming a smile, and relishing the idea of meeting some English women.
“No, Brian showed me a few steps himself,” I uttered, hardly believing I had said that.
“We don’t stand on ceremony, now that the Empire has shriveled in size,” Brian remarked with a little smirk.
“There’s nothing wrong with a bloke,” I said (being affectedly British), “showing another a few dance steps.”
“Or even a few moves not on the dance floor,” said his friend.
“And you weren’t even there the other night,” I shot back.
“I got a full report from Brian,” he said, self-satisfied and with a sexy grin.
I was waiting for the ax to fall. Mark was surveying the place and must have been aware he was being cruised.
“This was a chance meeting—and just like the other night—I love chance meetings,” said Brian in a sympathetic tone. He realized that Mark didn’t know about the very basic impulses that made me tick emotionally. He gave me a look that offered an undeserved reprieve. If Mark had any questions, he was going to allow me to answer them in private. He must have felt sorry for me, and let me slink away that I might continue to enjoy living one huge lie…
Mark didn’t cross-examine me after we left. That wasn’t his way. He was laid-back and easy about social intercourse and not judgmental. But he asked plainly, “Wasn’t that a gay pub?”
“I suppose so.”
“And the other night too?”
“Predominantly, I guess,” I said. “You know how metro these places are.”
Mark did not delve deeper about Brian, and I certainly was not going to fill in any details…
I introduced Brian as a guy I had met at a club. Mark wanted to know about the place, wanted to know where the girls were.
“I wouldn’t say there were girls at the club,” Brian said, to make me squirm.
“Weeknight,” I said weakly. “I had a cider.”
“We oughta try it tonight,” said Mark.
“It would be an eye-opener for you,” Brian said. I certainly deserved that.
Then his face broke into a big, knowing smile. I looked away and cringed. “Here we are at Oxford Circus. We were meant to meet! We can’t let this occasion slip away. And we can’t stay out in this heat. I know a pub—it’s not far.”
I was filled with the certainty that my hiding place was about to be exposed. As we entered the dark confines of the timbered-ceiling pub, a few of the regulars, just off work, had dropped in for their early pint and I heard the “darlings” dribbled over one another, and of course, Mark heard them too. Was I finally going to declare? Brian and his friend were hailed and chirped in return, “Hello, dear thing,” to one of the cute boys.
It was thumping through me, Just get it over with and blurt it out. Mark had a curious look. I thought, If I had lived in Nazi Germany, I’d be wearing a pink triangle. Finally, I said, “You know the place the other night was different from this one, there was dancing.”
“I didn’t know you danced, Maxey,” said Mark.
“I don’t very well. Brian can attest to that,” I said, ready for the blow to come.
“So, there were girls at the club!” Mark surmised, beaming a smile, and relishing the idea of meeting some English women.
“No, Brian showed me a few steps himself,” I uttered, hardly believing I had said that.
“We don’t stand on ceremony, now that the Empire has shriveled in size,” Brian remarked with a little smirk.
“There’s nothing wrong with a bloke,” I said (being affectedly British), “showing another a few dance steps.”
“Or even a few moves not on the dance floor,” said his friend.
“And you weren’t even there the other night,” I shot back.
“I got a full report from Brian,” he said, self-satisfied and with a sexy grin.
I was waiting for the ax to fall. Mark was surveying the place and must have been aware he was being cruised.
“This was a chance meeting—and just like the other night—I love chance meetings,” said Brian in a sympathetic tone. He realized that Mark didn’t know about the very basic impulses that made me tick emotionally. He gave me a look that offered an undeserved reprieve. If Mark had any questions, he was going to allow me to answer them in private. He must have felt sorry for me, and let me slink away that I might continue to enjoy living one huge lie…
Mark didn’t cross-examine me after we left. That wasn’t his way. He was laid-back and easy about social intercourse and not judgmental. But he asked plainly, “Wasn’t that a gay pub?”
“I suppose so.”
“And the other night too?”
“Predominantly, I guess,” I said. “You know how metro these places are.”
Mark did not delve deeper about Brian, and I certainly was not going to fill in any details…
