Heavy Water and Other Stories

fraternal. As he strode on toward the gym, bowlegged with thigh muscle, Cleve thought of twins (twins, which all primitive cultures feared), suspended together in liquid behind the fat glass.

Cleve returned to his Chelsea apartment a little before seven and found Grove in bed, noisily having sex with Kico, the disc-jockey cousin of the cabinetmaker, Pepe, who had built Cleve’s new bookcases earlier in the summer. Cleve went into the kitchen and fixed himself a cucumber sandwich. Annoyingly, Grove had left the little television switched on. (Grove was always doing that.) On the TV: more straight news. The straight thing—it was kind of amazing. You got through life hardly giving it a second thought and then, suddenly, everywhere you looked… Whoa: Here was a big item about Straight Freedom Day, as celebrated in San Francisco, “the straight capital of the world.” Cleve stopped chewing; his mustache was still. There was an aerial shot of the Straight Freedom Day Parade, in the Mission District, led by the Straight Freedom Day Marching Band. In cutaways, men and women of reassuringly—indeed, depressingly—earnest demeanor talked about straight concerns, straight demands, straight goals. Straight leaders and activists were coming to terms with their newfound political clout as the most important single voting bloc in a city where two in five adults were “openly straight.” In the Castro, it seemed, everyone was straight. The whole community. They had straight greengrocers, straight bank tellers, straight mailmen. They even had straight cops.

“They should be fuckin’ killed, men.”

Cigarette smoke. Cleve didn’t turn. This would be Kico. Kico: his leather pants festooned with color-coded scarves and plumes and cummerbunds (why didn’t he just stick with orange, which meant Anything?), his blood- seeping eyes, his feathery sweat-dotted mustache.

“Take them to fuckin’ Madagascar. That’s what they need.”

“Come on, Kico. Stop this ugly shit. Wow. Look at that.”

Onscreen, straight cowboys from the Reno Straight Rodeo pranced down Market Street, brandishing the flag of Nevada—and the rainbow banners, which now served (they said) as the standard of all California straights.

“So you think they okay. They the same.”

“Not the same, but they have lives to live. More than that, you could say it’s a tough call. Being straight.”

“They sick, men.”

Next I’ll be talking with Merv Cusid, said the television, who is hammering together a straight-rights plank to be presented at the convention in August. And then came a shot that even Cleve couldn’t smoothly breathe through or quite meet the eye of: a green hillside, with bright blankets strewn around, and, in queasy propaganda slow-mo, women and young children at play.

“Thass it. I see that I’m like, let me out of here.”

“Nature’s straight,” said Cleve with a sudden nod.

“And thass what they are, men. Fuckin’ animals.”

“Live and let live. Where’s Grove? Resting?”

“Sleeping.”

So Cleve, who had not had sex at the gym, blew Kico in the front hall and then set about making dinner: a Gorgonzola souffle to be followed by the Parma ham confit with pomegranate, papaw, papaya, and pomelo. Grove appeared, in his robe, and after a while silently served Cleve a glass of chilled Sauvignon. When he’d taken a shower, Grove reappeared, with a white towel on his hips. Grove was in great shape. Cleve was in great shape. The street, the city—the world they were living in—might as well have been called Great Shape. Over dinner they had a long, loud, and poisonously personal argument about which was better: Cosi fan tutte or Die Zauberflote. They made it up while Grove did the decaf.

It was too late to go to any of the things they might have gone to, the gallery openings or moonlit yard sales, the long-dong or class-ass contests, the recitals or lectures, the dinner discos—the antique-sale previews, the travel-agent office parties. So why not have a quiet one? Thus they crouched round the low table in the living room and picked through the magazines. Even Cleve, at such a time, was ready to put aside his Trollope or his Dostoyevsky and pick through the magazines. And smoke a little herb. The contemplation of great texts, in Grove’s company, made Cleve self-conscious. Or perhaps it was Cressida that made him self-conscious: He could almost hear his self-consciousness, like a shell’s imitation of the shore. Even when they are in great shape, hypochondriacs have an illness they can worry about: hypochondria. Cleve, this night, was paranoid about his hypochondria. It might get so much worse… He kept inspecting Grove: his kitteny hair, his tank top, his mustache. The way he read magazines backwards, with his lips crinkled in stoical inanity. Of all Cleve’s lovers, only Grainge had ever shared his intellectual curiosity and literary passion. Only Grainge…

Soon after eleven Grove looked up from his copy of Torso and said, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the Toilet.”

Cleve looked up from his copy of Blueboy and said, “You know, that was pretty funny. The first few times you said it. Besides I know you don’t hit the Bowl anymore.”

“Who said?”

“You go to Folsom Prison.”

“Who said?”

“Fraze,” said Cleve.

When Grove was out the door Cleve went to bed with the little TV.… All this straight talk was following him around. At the Democratic National Convention, to be held in New York, the straight caucus was larger than the delegations of twenty states. There was even serious speculation about a straight vice-presidential candidate on the Ted Kennedy ticket. Cleve’s mustache smiled. Dumb thought: Say Ted Kennedy was straight. Imagine it. Wouldn’t that, in a wild way, be kind of Hot?

Grove woke him, around four, as usual. He fought off his clothes and crashed down onto the bed— comfortingly redolent, as usual, of Tattoo and amyl nitrate.

In The New York Review of Books Cleve saw an ad for an “all-straight sea cruise,” Philadelphia to Maine. Why did this haunt him so? He found he no longer laughed when friends cracked straight jokes. How many straights does it take to change a lightbulb? He seemed to see more and more straights in the street now, not just in the immediate environs of Greenwich Avenue but over on Eighth Street, over on Washington Square. Cleve continued to put in the hours at the gym. The great bolts of his shoulder muscles now brushed the very lobes of his ears. His superb upper body: would it be truer to say it was under control or out of control? Cleve’s gym was called Magnificent Obsession. How often he would plod from Magnificent Obsession to the Idle Hour, from the Idle Hour to Magnificent Obsession…

His hypochondria took a turn for the worse—or did he mean for the better? Because his hypochondria had never felt hardier or more vigorous. Cleve was already an exorbitant devourer of health sections and medical columns and pathology pullouts in the newspapers and magazines. But now a fellow hypochondriac—and self- topiarist—at Magnificent Obsession kept feeding him more and more gear. These days Cleve was even reading The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In its pages he had started seeing references to what they were now calling Straight Cervix Syndrome. And seeing the straights in the street Cleve would wonder if something was waiting for them, something of the same size as their newfound tautness and address.

Cleve broke up with Grove. Grove with his entirely unromantic untidiness, his intelligently selective consumerism, his dharmic trances, his foul temper, his plans for the afterlife, and his 2.7 nightly sexual contacts. For a while Cleve was two-point-sevening it himself. But now he had fallen for a talented young chinoiserist called Harv.

“Pride and Prejudice?” said Cressida.

Every winter Cleve reread half of Jane Austen. Three novels, one in November, one in December, one in January. Every spring he reread the other half. This was January and this was Pride and Prejudice.

“Yeah,” he said. “For like the ninth time. What I can’t get over is—every time I read it I’m on the edge of my seat, rooting for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. You know—will Elizabeth finally make it with Charlotte Lucas? Will Mr. Darcy finally get it on with Mr. Bingley? I mean, I know everything’s going to turn out fine. But I still suffer. It’s ridiculous.”