His eyebrows shot up as though something was chasing them. “Are you correcting me?”
“ Dolares,” I said again. “ Dolores means pains.”
“Henry?”
“The fuck would I know?”
“Well,” Hanks said comfortably, “it was all a pain to Max. He had to be True To Himself. He wanted to-God’s truth-he wanted to come out, as they say today.” He sat back and watched me brightly, waiting for me to fall out of my chair. “In the nineteen fifties.”
“And you wouldn’t let him.”
“Are you crazy? Rumors were already flying about my little stable. You’re too young to remember Confidential magazine, but they were hot on our cute little tails. Most of my young men were discreet-two of them were even straight-but some of them had their nuts in the wringer. Parties got raided and there were all these boys in pajamas, or not in pajamas, depending on when the door got knocked in. All these studs with the superhero names I’d dreamed up for them and the oh-so-butch voices I’d taught them to use, hadn’t I, sweetheart?” he asked one of the dogs, toying with its ear. “We did everything for them in those days. Actors knew they were cattle back then, not like now when they think they can elect presidents and run the Pentagon. We named them, taught them to walk-that was usually hilarious-gave them pasts, gave them wives when things got touchy, wiped their expensive new noses when they got sick. It was a big investment. Not something to be thrown away because a cop went through the wrong door or some damn fool wanted to be true to himself. Be true to me, I told him, be true to your public. Stop thinking about yourself all the time.”
“What did he say?”
“Said he wasn’t thinking about himself, he was thinking about All Of Us, all us poor downtrodden queers locked in our closets. The closet’s good, I told him. It gives us strength, gives us self-discipline. Gives us a secret. People with a secret are always more interesting than people who don’t have one.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Passionately. We were united then. We shared our problems, shared our jokes. The straight world was open to us, there for us to plunder, like King Solomon’s mines or the Hall of the Mountain King. We were the Knights of Malta, a secret society, smarter and prettier and funnier than they were, and we had what they wanted, and they didn’t know what it was or even why they wanted it. They had one little life each, and we had as many as we wanted. You can develop a lot of useful skills if you’re leading a secret life, or three or four. God, it was a glorious time.”
“You were apparently outvoted.”
“Democracy is a terrible thing. The ordinary always wins. I was on the losing side. Max’s bunch won, and look where it’s gotten them. The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name has become The Love That Cannot Shut Its Trap. Gays have become the one thing they never were: boring. Look at them, a bunch of bank tellers and dental assistants, holding hands on the sidewalks and mooning at each other. Joining neighborhood watch organizations. The fucking Kiwanis.” He stopped to clear his throat, and it turned into a cough, deep and hacking, that bent him over the table until his face almost touched it. When he straightened up, he was the color of rare beef. “Henry,” he said pleadingly.
“The drowning man,” Henry said, ponderous as the Old Testament, “want his drink of water.”
“Old age is vicious,” Hanks said, wiping his eyes, “and I mean that literally. It strips away everything but our vices and then denies us those. If you’re lucky, you’ll die young.”
No easy rejoinder sprang to my lips.
“It’s disgusting,” he said. “All I tried to do was get Max married, for his own good, to my perfectly nice secretary, and he hated me for the rest of his life. Quit the series, turned his back on all of us, went off to some filthy third-world country to get worms, and came back a cut-rate prophet, a walking Kmart of spiritual misinformation. Working his shabby little ministry for ego gratification, rescuing the dull, frumpy ones who weren’t handsome enough or smart enough to qualify for the New Jerusalem, the bogus, bourgeois, inane empire of ennui with all its brave muscle-bound subjects. Oh, yes, in the new gay order, life is free, life is open, and all are welcome. As long as they’re pretty and slim and vapid and…”
“Young,” I suggested.
He sank back emptily on the couch, blinked, and smoothed the short hair down over his forehead. “That, too, of course. Not that age is at much of a premium in the heterosexual world, either.”
“You called Max,” I said. “Asked him to come back to work. Repeatedly.”
His eyes got wary. “Someone’s been talking out of turn.”
“Why did you bother?”
“There were parts,” he said shortly.
“And thousands of actors who could have played them. Why keep calling someone who’d turned his back on you, someone who was guaranteed to say no?”
Hanks’s eyes flicked to Henry and then up to one of the crowded Thai carvings. “Bought that at the wrong end of the market,” he said. “I’ve always been better at dealing in people.”
I didn’t look at it. “Why Max?”
He watched the carving expectantly, as though he were waiting for the people to come to life and start dancing. “He was the one who got away.”
I looked at him until the silence brought him back to me.
“Max was a good actor,” he said, sounding defiant.
“You tried to destroy him.”
He snorted, not a pleasant sound. “If I’d wanted to destroy him, I would have. Destruction is something I can do in my sleep. In a coma. Max destroyed himself.”
“And you pursued him like a Fury.”
“The Furies were always my favorites,” he said. “Single-mindedness is such an admirable trait.”
“And then, decades later, you tried to get him back.”
“Self-interest,” he said. “Economics, pure and simple.”
I watched him until he looked away. “Max broke your heart.”
“Hearts don’t break,” he said to the people in the carving. “You’re old enough to know that. They shrink, they-they corrode — they atrophy with lack of use, but they don’t break. ‘Men have died, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ That how it goes, Henry?”
“Thass how I recollect it.”
“Henry is my literary adviser,” Hanks said. “You may have been wondering what he was doing here.”
“I hadn’t.”
“He likes to stand in one place for long periods of time. You’ve probably noticed that. He’s not idle, though. He’s working on a mental concordance of English lyric poetry. Aren’t you, Henry.”
“You say so, Ferris.”
“I do say so,” Hanks said. “I say it every chance I get.”
“You loved Max,” I said.
“ Everybody loved Max,” Hanks said, slapping the table with the flat of his hand. I’d heard a number of people say those words, but not with such intensity. “Max was one of those people other people throw love at. He accepted it like, like air, like confetti, like nothing. He didn’t even know I loved him. He didn’t notice. I turned my life inside out for Max. I got rid of clients who weren’t his type, fixed it so other agents wouldn’t take them on. I negotiated raises for him when he was already one of the three highest-paid actors in television. He didn’t notice. He said, ‘Really, Ferris? That’s nice. Can we do anything about the scripts?’ I got the best writers in town, writers who hated television. I blackmailed one of them to write scripts for Max, told him wouldn’t it be awful if his wife found out about his little tootsie and started thinking community property. A writer everybody wanted, fucking Brando wanted him, and there it was in the trades that he was writing for Tarnished Star. Let me tell you something, boysie, one of the tricks of having power is that you don’t throw it around. I was throwing it around like a drunk, like a novice, and all for Max. And what did it get me? Gornischt is what it got me. A lawsuit from the network when Max walked is what it got me. A nasty postcard from India is what it got me. Break my heart? Don’t make me laugh.”
“I haven’t,” I said.
He passed a hand over his forehead. “I don’t remember the last time I laughed.”
