ROILING
“Roiling,” Paul said with a frown on his face. “Every book I read these days has that word in it.”
He sat up from the futon.
“Why do you think that is?” I asked.
He shook his head. He was reading a novel by David Leavitt, a gay author we both disliked.
I reeled off a few synonyms for the word. “Tumultuous, conflictual, upsetting.”
“Except it’s not,” he answered. “There is absolutely nothing going on in this novel.”
“There has to be something,” I said. “Something about our gay lives.”
David Leavitt was one of the few gay novelists whose work had crossed over to the straight side. He was the translator, the bridge to liberal America. Paul had picked the book up off of my mother’s glass coffee table in the living room. He was here at my mother’s house for our annual summer visit.
He laid back down on the futon.
“Oh, spare me all the interior angst,” he said to the book a few minutes later.
Paul’s face was sallow. The blond streaks in his hair faded to white. He was different this summer. It was only ten o’clock. He was basically in bed. I’d never known him to fold up shop so early. The prowling urge seemed gone, the perking up after a very late start to the day lasting to the wee hours of the next morning. Paul always opened up to the possibility of night for me. Like many gay men, he knew the dark stretches of many metropolitan areas, the borders of parks, the alleyways, along the rivers, in the tunnels. His stories of these encounters thrilling me, filling me with dread.
We were older. There was no denying it. No denying the effects that the HIV drugs had on him. He never showed me the huge plastic box of pills he took with all the compartments marked with the days of the week. Each day had many doses of pills. Pill taking was hidden like most of his addictions. When he visited my mother’s house each summer, he smoked cigarettes outside in the dark or down the street from the house. He didn’t drink in bars anymore and the booze he brought back from the store in brown paper bags was consumed outside on the porch. The surface seemed calm. Not roiling.
“David Leavitt’s fiction is for straight people,” I said. “It makes them feel good they know something about gay people. It serves that function.”
“Have a heart attack!” he yelled at the book. “A fainting spell! An epileptic seizure! For god’s sake. Do something!”
He threw the book down and picked up one he had brought from Boston where he lived. He removed it from the huge black satchel he carried on his back like some new immigrant to this country. It was a dog-eared, yellowed mystery that he had gotten from the free box outside the bookstore.
“Murder?” I asked and he nodded.
“Now we’ll get some action,” he said.
He had traveled from Boston to New York City on a bus that left him in Chinatown, then he took the Long Island Railroad to my mother’s house. It took all day, but the bus only cost twenty dollars.
“Why does he travel like a kid?” my mother asked.
“I think it’s the money,” I said, but she didn’t understand.
“He’s not a kid anymore,” my mother said. “He’s not really well.”
“I think it’s the money,” I reiterated, but she still didn’t understand.
When Paul arrived at the house, my mother showered him with kisses. Ever since reading David Leavitt and visiting Paul in Boston herself, she had a new-found appreciation for gay men. It was like the entire world of fashion, interior design and arch commentary had opened up. Paul had become our shared gay man. Standing in the doorway of my mother’s small Victorian house on Long Island’s North Shore, Paul’s back was bent from the satchel, and he was wearing a little black cap.
“You look like Fiddler on the Roof!” she said. “Tevye from the old country. But why didn’t you take a plane?”
Paul shrugged it off and laughed. He has never demanded honesty in a relationship. In fact, the very idea appalled him.
“And your hair!” she said. “Have you done something to it?”
His hair with new white streaks was bobbed and combed straight forward with bangs cut in a Dutch-boy style.
“I like it!” she lied.
My mother was good at that too.
Paul then hoisted up the black satchel and trudged up the narrow stairway to the attic room we shared, the one with the futon on the floor. I followed after him. He threw down the book he had been reading on the bus.
“The Multi-Orgasmic Gay Man,” I read the title.
“Reading about it is the best I can do at this point,” he said.
***
“How do you like the David Leavitt book?” my mother called from downstairs.
We looked at each other. Did she want to know how truthful we thought it was? Or more realistically, to gay men’s lives as lesbians didn’t figure in much for either David Leavitt or my mother. Ellen was about as close as it got to any mention of who I was and that was okay with me. I never relished being an ambassador from a foreign country, informing her when she really didn’t want to know.
“It’s okay,” Paul shouted down.
“It thought it was really good,” she yelled back up.
“He doesn’t like it, Ma,” I screamed down. “He doesn’t think it’s roiling enough.”
“What?” she asked. “I can’t hear you.”
Paul gave me that look that meant don’t push your luck with her.
“Why don’t you come down?”
That’s what she wanted. Paul’s attention.
“We’re thinking of going out,” I said even though we both knew we wouldn’t.
“Well then you have to come down,” she said.
“We should go out,” I said, wanting to pretend that our lives were still exciting.
“We should,” he agreed from the futon. “And talk to your mother first.”
He was already in his red silk pajamas, a thin, glistening material that made him look like a lead in a 1940’s movie.
“Isn’t it hot up there?” my mother yelled up.
It was hot. It was August in New York and the little Victorian house captured it all upstairs. The crickets were carrying on outside. It was as if they held the dense, humid air in position. The weather report said torrential rain for tomorrow.
Paul changed to baggy black shorts, and we went downstairs. My mother was sitting on her throne, otherwise known as the red couch, in the small room that was equipped with all she needed for her many hours of alone time since my father died from a heart attack. Books, a CD player, her iPad, the phone.
“You don’t like the David Leavitt?’ she asked him.
“I do,” Paul said, “It’s just that I’m more in the mood for a mystery.”
“Or the multi-orgasmic gay man,” I whispered.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Are you two going out?”
“We really should,” Paul said as we both sat there.
He said it in the fey way a 1940’s movie star would say it, with an intonation of world-weariness matched by unceasing sophistication. I loved Paul for that intonation, it made me feel like we were at the center of things even if we were only spending a boring night at my mother’s house on Long Island.
“What mystery are you reading?” she asked to keep the conversation going.
“Oh, you’d like it!” he said with a warmth that showed he did care for her. That was there, too, in this mix. They saw something of themselves in each other.
She responded with a big smile and in a tone attempting her own sophistication. “I’m going to take that as a compliment. We have the same reading tastes.”
“As you should,” he replied.
***
Paul had a wonderful way with her. It’s not true either that he wasn’t honest. He just never quite told the truth, but he never quite told her a lie either. He was a diplomat. His visits to Long Island every summer grew to many purposes—to spend time with me, to diffuse the relationship between me and her, to help decorate the house and to keep her company. The yearly visits spanned at least a decade now. It was the closest thing to tradition I had. Paul had witnessed enough fights between me and my mother to be an honorary member of the family.
***
“She’s so needy,” I said once to him.
“Of course she is, dear,” he said absentmindedly.
“You’re so good with her.”
“She’s not my mother. That helps a lot.”
“She’s a bitch.”
“Now, now. Of course she’s a bitch. She’s a rich, spoiled bitch and it’s all about her. If you can remember that it will be much easier.”
“But what about me?”
Paul had been reading another mystery at the time. He peered over his book, a look of disbelief on his face.
***
“You really think that color will work for the kitchen cabinets?” my mother asked Paul now from her red couch.
“I do,” he said.
“I’m glad you two finally came to a decision on that,” I said, and they both stared coldly at me.
Paul and my mother had spent the afternoon discussing what color the kitchen cabinets should be painted. They had gone to the paint store and returned with reams of color samples. Paul held little swatches to the light while my mother assessed them and then they switched roles. Endless discussion followed on how other parts of the kitchen would have to change if a certain color was picked. The debate over furnishings was an established fact of their relationship. It whiled away long hours in an essentially boring but scenic Long Island town, endeared them to each other, justified Paul’s visits, established a shared aesthetic take. On other visits, they discussed the color of the outdoor shutters. The placement of that red couch in my mother’s room. The flow of furniture in the living room. The statement made by a chaise on the porch.
“I like orange,” I said.
“I don’t know how you could call the color orange,” Paul said coolly.
“On what planet is that color orange?” my mother asked.
“Never mind, it’s a great color!”
They both continued to stare. I have never been a good liar.
“I am glad you like it,” my mother said in that wounded voice that implied that honesty is never the best policy.
“I think I will just go to bed.”
My mother waved me off with her hand.
“We’ll drive into Manhattan tomorrow,” she promised Paul.
“It’s going to be raining,” I said.
“A little rain.”
“Torrential rain.”
New York of recent years had become a climate change nightmare. Broiling summer days followed by dark skies and sheets of rain like the tropics.
“A little rain never hurt anyone,” she concluded like the tough New Yorker she was.
***
The torrential rains came the next morning. My mother crept upstairs at around ten o’clock. Paul was still sleeping in an askew position, the sheets tangled between his legs, his red silk pajama top jettisoned onto the floor. She glanced at me beside him on the futon, reading the Multi-Orgasmic Gay Man. I lowered the book so she couldn’t see the title. She looked at me with distaste. My mother still found it shocking that two people of the opposite sex could sleep on one futon and just be friends. It took some years of reckoning to factor in the sexual orientation of those two people especially since one of them was her daughter. The entire counterculture of my youth was something neither of my parents ever understood except as it filtered down over the decades to food you bought in the health food store or ten-minute meditation to relieve anxiety.
“Good book?” she asked.
“Excellent.”
“I’ll have to read it again. I love David Leavitt.”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s very perceptive.”
“Did he have nightmares last night?” she asked in a whisper about Paul.
Ever since his brother’s suicide, his mother’s death, and his HIV diagnosis, Paul’s sleep has been disturbed.
“They’re haunting me from the grave,” he would say.
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him when he wakes up.”
“He is different this time,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
She sighed. “He’s not well. He’s more troubled.”
She didn’t sound like a bitch then. That’s the thing about people. They’re not all one way.
“We’ll drive into Manhattan when he wakes up.”
“Ma, it’s pouring. It’s treacherous driving.”
“Let’s take the train then.”
“Ma, it will take hours with all the connections.”
“Let’s drive in then.”
“Ma, it’s pouring.”
“A little rain,” she said like the tough New Yorker she was.
***
At about noon, the rain paused. My mother drove us through rain-slicked streets. When the rain started up again, the windshield wiper did fast-time, but I still could barely see out from the passenger seat. Paul dozed in the back seat. My mother got lost looking for the museum because even though she was an intrepid driver, she had no sense of direction. We drove the streets of the West Village. Nowhere else is Manhattan such a labyrinth. Its other avenues laid out grid-like, broad and straight, to induce the flow of traffic. In the Village, traffic bogged down, people were pushed closer together, trees line the streets, and on sunny days coffeehouses spill onto the sidewalks. Boutiques, antique shops, bakeries, cheese mongers, pizzerias shared the block with gay bars and bondage shops. I thought of all the times in the past decade Paul and I explored the city on our annual trip. We took the train in from Long Island, or we stayed overnight at a hotel. I would have him all to myself. We drove past the Cubby Hole. I wanted to wake Paul up in the back seat to tell him. We loved happy hour at the Cubby Hole.
“Grandmother had her first drink at 4 o’clock,” Paul would say. “Mother did too.”
He’d look at his pocket watch and if it was earlier he’d say, “Always 4 o’clock somewhere.”
I imagined his mother with her beehive hairdo and long cigarette holder. His grandmother with her frosted, blue hair sipping the first martinis. They didn’t drink together. They hated each other.
***
I remembered the piano bar we’d go to after our first drink at the Cubby Hole. We’d get there early by city standards and find a few regulars sitting around the piano while the piano player tinkled away. They were mostly old queens and a Jewish-looking lesbian wearing a straw boater and dressed for vaudeville. I loved this place because the clientele was the direct heir to Tin Pan Alley. They kept its spirit alive. Collectively, they had an encyclopedic knowledge of every tune that had crossed a Broadway stage. Their emotional lives were arrested in the forties, when Moss Hart collaborated with Richard Rodgers. They had their fedoras and double-breasted suits ready for a special occasion, or at least the Jewish lesbian did. The piano bar itself was a stinking hole. Its floors sloped, its tables wobbled, its bar was stained, the toilets were down a long, dark hallway.
One time, I excused myself and took the trip. When I returned, Paul was comfortably sipping on his second drink. The night picked up. More people gathered around the piano. A spirited rendition of “All that Jazz” ensued, enthusiasm replacing talent. Paul whispered that Marie, the fabled owner of the piano bar, was about to make an appearance. The air was one of great anticipation. It was rumored that Marie had once appeared on Broadway.
Paul got up to go to the toilet. A few seconds later, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a young guy who was bizarrely dressed in a black raincoat streaking past me. “All that Jazz” was going into overtime, and Marie hadn’t appeared, when Paul rushed back to the table we were sitting at.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, with panic in his voice.
“You haven’t finished your drink.”
“I have to get out of here,” he repeated.
“Marie hasn’t even come yet.”
“Go. We have to go.”
Before I said another word, he ran out the door, leaving behind the small, baby-blue tote bag from Kiel’s cosmetics that he had been proudly carrying around all day.
“Forget this?” Outside on the sidewalk, I handed it to him.
His face was bright red and he was sweating.
“Did you see that guy in the black raincoat?”
The image of the streaker came back to me.
“I was taking a piss, and all of a sudden this guy barges in…”
“Oh my God!” I said, imagining a robbery. “Did he have a gun?”
Paul looked at me strangely.
“He gets down on his knees and crawls towards me, wanting to suck me off.”
I was speechless. Here I was enjoying a Broadway medley and this was going on as well.
“Oh my God!” I said. “You didn’t let him of course!”
Paul didn’t answer, instead he lit a cigarette.
“I can’t believe I almost lost my Kiel’s foamless shaving cream.”
“You let him?”
He straightened himself up using the Alexander Technique, a practice he had been extolling for years. It involved tucking in the jaw and aligning the back of the neck. He said it made him noticeably taller.
“Of course I said no when he wanted to put his tongue in my butt.” He said it proudly but quietly.
“Admirable.”
“I don’t really do that stuff anymore,” he said. “The opportunity just presented itself so to speak.”
“I hope not.”
He looked at me sadly.
“Gay men amaze me.”
“Do they, darling?”
“Did you suck him off?” I was starting to get into it. It was tumultuous, conflictual, upsetting.
“Of course not. That’s not how this works. He kept his pants on.”
“So, then what happened?”
“He crawled back out of the bathroom on his knees.”
“Wow.”
“Damn, why wasn’t it that cute waiter?” he moaned.
“Why did we have to leave so suddenly?”
“Are you kidding? I didn’t want to see that creep again. What if he came up to us at the table? What if he wanted to sit with us?”
“I wanted to hear Marie sing.”
Paul patted my hand. “I’ll make it up to you, darling, I promise.”
***
The rain had let up a little and my mother sped up past the Cubby Hole, made a turn and there was the piano bar.
“Paul! The piano bar!” I poked him in the back seat.
He came to life and rubbed the condensation off the side window and peered out.
“Some place you go?” my mother’s eyes lit up at the undercurrent of a good story.
“We do.”
“Is it nice?”
“Very nice.”
“Paulie?” she asked.
“Very nice.”
“Glad we established that,” I said.
My mother glared. “You kids don’t have to tell me everything. I understand.” Paul warmed to being called a kid.
“Hardly a kid anymore. More like an old man sitting on a divan and remembering the good old days. You’d enjoy the piano bar. It’s retro.”
She made a sudden left-hand turn on the slick street without signaling. Taxis blared their horns. A guy in a truck leaned out his window and cursed her in New Yorkese.
“Don’t think I don’t suffer,” she said like I never considered the possibility.
“We all do. Suffer,” I said.
She considered. A person who basically had two responses to people. Was she fucking them or were they fucking her? Paul gazed out the window, remembering New York’s promise of a good time.
“Gee, I hope we can find the museum,” I said.
“I know that you suffer in silence,” she added like it took everything out of her to make that concession.
I was stunned. My eyes filled with liquid. Maybe I could talk to her after all. Paul made a low whistle. .
“I suffer in silence too,” she continued.
Her silent suffering only eclipsed by the loudness of it. It was over that quickly, any hope of talking to her.
“I am wondering,” she proposed, “if you mightn’t, in between your mega activities, have considered your obligation to me?”
“Mega” seemed to be her new word. It defined her. It spoke to this city and its bigness. It suggested the overdrive and killer ambitions a New Yorker had to have.
“Perhaps, when you reconsider a certain time, you will recognize the importance of one’s word and even come up with words to explain your actions,” she continued in that tight tone.
I had no idea what she was talking about but then it didn’t matter because it was a variation of the themes of my childhood—what terrible things I had done.
“When Daddy died…” she reminded me.
“What? What didn’t I do?”
She shook her head and the muscle in her jaw flinched. She shook her head no. She was not at liberty to discuss it. If I didn’t know, then there was no point and no hope. She would suffer in silence. For the minute.
“Paul was there. He would know. Do you remember anything I didn’t do?”
He refused to answer. He had enough on his plate these days.
“After he died,” she prompted.
“You told me not to come home. There wasn’t even a funeral. You said not to come.”
Her lips pressed together.
“I was as traumatized by the whole thing as you,” I protested. “The months of his suffering in that horrible nursing home after the heart attack. The intubation. The scooping out of the mucus from his mouth. The breathing issues. The fact that he tried to do the physical therapy but couldn’t even squeeze those little red rubber balls they handed him.”
Her face was impassive. Of course, she had suffered more than me with him. The years before, when he became so depressed that he lay in the bed like he was entombed in lead, answering only in monosyllables that sounded like dim, strange echoes from a deep cave. She hadn’t wanted him to get into the bed during the day. Daylight had no place for depression. She wanted him to sit up even as depression drove him to the ground. He’d sit in the small round chair in the living room, his head bending, his eyes closed. Until he couldn’t then he’d lie on the bed. She would scream how she was going to divorce him; how presumptuous it was of him to do this to her. He’d place the one foot that still had a shoe on the floor. Covers over his head, stretched out in the bed with a one shoe foot placed firmly on the floor, signaling that he was still fighting the depression, that he heard her and was appeasing her.
***
The liquid flowed out of my eye down my cheek, but I turned my head so she wouldn’t see it.
“Does this remind you of the David Leavitt book?” I asked Paul.
“Oh no, not at all,” he answered from the back in a voice that implied he knew everything. “This is roiling.”
