'Frankly, yes.'
'I see.' Lee thought, 'Dume never misses.'
The waiter put two martinis on the table. Lee held his martini up to the candle, looking at it with distaste. 'The inevitable watery martini with a decomposing olive,' he said.
Lee bought a lottery ticket from a boy of ten or so, who had rushed in when the waiter went to the kitchen. The boy was working the last-ticket routine. Lee paid him expansively, like a drunk American.
'Go buy yourself some marijuana, son,' he said. The boy smiled and turned to leave. 'Come back in five years and make an easy ten pesos,' Lee called after him.
Allerton smiled. 'Thank god,' Lee thought. 'I won't have to contend with middle-class morality.'
'Here you are, sir,' said the waiter, placing the shish kebab on the table.
Lee ordered two glasses of red wine. 'So Dume told you about my, uh, proclivities?' he said abruptly.
'Yes,' said Allerton, his mouth full.
'A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands—the lymph glands that is, of course— when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze, like a man with a light concussion—just a minute, Doctor Kildare, this isn't your script. I might well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen—
Bobo, we called her—who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love.
Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink. . . .
'Poor Bobo came to a sticky end. He was riding in the Duc de Ventre's Hispano-Suiza when his falling piles blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted, leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe-skin upholstery. Even the eyes and the brain went, with a horrible shlupping sound. The Duc says he will carry that ghastly shlup with him to his mausoleum. . . .
'Then I knew the meaning of loneliness. But Bobo's words came back to me from the tomb, the sibilants cracking gently. 'No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.' The difficulty is to convince someone else he is really part of you, so what the hell? Us parts ought to work together. Reet?'
Lee paused, looking at Allerton speculatively. 'Just where do I stand with the kid?' he wondered.
He had listened politely, smiling at intervals. 'What I mean is, Allerton, we are all parts of a tremendous whole. No use fighting it.' Lee was getting tired of the routine. He looked around restlessly for some place to put it down. 'Don't these gay bars depress you? Of course, the queer bars here aren't to compare with Stateside queer joints.'
'I wouldn't know,' said Allerton. 'I've never been in any queer joints except those Dume took me to. I guess there's kicks and kicks.'
'You haven't, really?'
'No, never.'
Lee paid the bill and they walked out into the cool night. A crescent moon was clear and green in the sky. They walked aimlessly.
'Shall we go to my place for a drink? I have some Napoleon brandy.'
'All right,' said AUerton.
'This is a completely unpretentious little brandy, you understand, none of this tourist treacle with obvious effects of flavoring, appealing to the mass tongue. My brandy has no need of shoddy devices to shock and coerce the palate. Come along.' Lee called a cab.
'Three pesos to Insurgentes and Monterrey,' Lee said to the driver in his atrocious Spanish. The driver said four. Lee waved him on. The driver muttered something, and opened the door.
Inside, Lee turned to Allerton. 'The man plainly harbors subversive thoughts. You know, when I was at Princeton, Communism was the thing. To come out flat for private property and a class society, you marked yourself a stupid lout or suspect to be a High Episcopalian pederast. But I held out against the infection—of Communism I mean, of course.'
'Aqui.' Lee handed three pesos to the driver, who muttered some more and started the car with a vicious clash of gears.
'Sometimes I think they don't like us,' said Allerton.
'I don't mind people disliking me,' Lee said. 'The question is, what are they in a position to do about it? Apparently nothing, at present. They don't have the green light. This driver, for example, hates gringos. But if he kills someone—and very possibly he will—it will not be an American. It will be another Mexican. Maybe his good friend. Friends are less frightening than strangers.'
Lee opened the door of his apartment and turned on the light. The apartment was pervaded by seemingly hopeless disorder. Here and there, ineffectual attempts had been made to arrange things in piles. There were no lived-in touches. No pictures, no decorations. Clearly, none of the furniture was his. But Lee's presence permeated the apartment. A coat over the back of a chair and a hat on the table were immediately recognizable as belonging to Lee.
'I'll fix you a drink.' Lee got two water glasses from the kitchen and poured two inches of Mexican brandy in each glass.
