I'm sorry things aren't going well for Tad, I really am. He deserves better. He was always extremely possessive, but he was also loving, and generous-'
Greco began suddenly to cough and gasp, and said the foul air was bothering him, so we walked out into the oppressive but smokeless night and stood alongside my car.
I said, 'Tad took you in when you first came out?'
'Oh, no,' Greco said, laughing lightly and breathing more easily now. 'It was nothing like that.
I'd been out since I was fourteen and on my own since I was eighteen. Tad was ten years ago. I was twenty-four then and I'd already had several lovers. Tad must have been the-I don't know — fifteenth or twentieth.'
Persons of the New Age. When I was twenty-four I was getting my kicks trying to decipher whether or not Ishmael might actually be getting it on with Queequeg.
'I didn't really settle down,' Greco went on blithely, 'until the year after that when I met Fenton and realized what I wanted to do with my life and who I wanted to do it with. No, the thing with Tad was… he was in love with me, and he paid to have my first volume of poems printed. I was reluctant. I knew I wasn't as crazy about Tad as he was about me. But I was too excited about 27 seeing my work in print to think straight, and I let him do it. I know it cost him a lot of money, but-God, how can somebody be that bitter after ten years?'
'Right. You'd think in all that time a person's feelings about someone would have gone through a lot of changes. Gotten milder, mellower.' I watched for Timmy's yellow Chevette to pull in off Central.
'Oh, jeez, it's time,' Greco said, glancing at his watch. 'I've gotta get back to the house by midnight and stay with Dot and Edith so their friend can go home. Are you coming out for a while?'
I looked at him, wondering if the invitation was significant in a particular way. Being a not unattentive fellow- fifteen or twenty lovers by age twenty-four-he saw my interest.
'We could go out for a swim in the pond and lie down together under the stars,' was what I first thought I heard him say, but what Greco actually said was 'We could run off some more leaflets and wait for Fenton to get home. The mimeo machine's in the trunk of the car.'
Ethics. Had I had them once? Could I again?
I said, 'No, thanks. Timmy-my lover-is probably looking for me, so I guess I'll hang around here. I'll be at home later, so call if there's any problem out at Dot's. Otherwise, I'll be out there first thing in the morning.'
'I'm glad you're helping us,' he said, smiling. 'Even if you're on the payroll of the Great Satan.'
His eyes shone with their sweet humor, and I wanted again badly to touch him.
'Better not let the Ayatollah Fenton hear you say that,' I said. 'He still has this crazy idea that just because I'm a minion of Moloch I'm somehow not to be trusted.'
'Trust is something you have to earn with Fenton,' Greco said. 'But once you've got it, you've got it for keeps.'
He grinned again, looking as though he were trying to tell me something useful, and wondering if I'd caught on. Then he brushed my cheek with his hand again, the exasperating little shit, and we both went back inside the bar so that he could find McWhirter and get the car keys.
A few minutes later, I watched Greco head back out to the parking lot, and I rejoined McWhirter and the leafleters. They had signed up two men for the GNS at the Green Room, bringing the grand total for the bar tour to six.
By three-fifteen Timmy still had not shown up. By three-thirty I had befriended, in a narrow but specific way, a slender youngish man named Gordon whose black hair was as curly as Greco's, and whose eyes were as dark, though a good bit dimmer, as was the area behind them. At three-forty we pulled into the deserted parking lot of a Washington Avenue institution of higher learning. At three-fifty-one we pulled out again. He asked if I'd mind dropping him off at the Watering Hole, which wouldn't close for another nine minutes, and I did.
'Catch ya later, Ron,' he said.
'For sure, Gordon, for sure.'
Then I drove home.
The shower wasn't necessary except for purposes of general sanitation and cooling off. I wouldn't even have had to brush my teeth. Or wash both hands. But still I stayed under the cool-tepid spray for a good, cleansing fifteen minutes.
I settled into an easy chair and lit an imaginary cigarette. I wanted a real one and thought about driving over to Price Chopper to pick up a pack; it had been more than four years since I'd been off the killer weed, but what the hell. No, I'd smoke a joint instead, just something to feel the soothing harshness on my throat.
I rummaged around in the freezer, but all the little foil-wrapped packages I opened contained chicken necks. Timmy, the world's only Irish anal-retentive, saving up for a chicken-neck party or some goddamn thing.
A car pulled into the parking lot down below. Zip, back to the easy chair. I opened Swann's Way and sat there frowning toward it, as if I had been absorbed in the book since the second Eisenhower administration, which, intermittently, I had.
His footfall in the corridor. His hair would be mussed, his shirttail out. Cum on his eyebrow.
Anal hickeys.
His key in the lock.
'So, there you are, you elusive devil!' He laid his jacket on the couch and bent to kiss me. 'I've been all up and down the avenue since ten-thirty. Everywhere I went I just missed you. You must have left the Green Room about a minute before I got there. Sorry about the screw-up, but my damn radiator sprung a leak. Seems half the cars in Albany overheated today, so I ended up with a rental car for the weekend. How'd it go tonight?'
He was busily climbing out of his Brooks Brothers work clothes, noticing with horror, of course, the jacket he'd just dropped on the couch, and carrying it to the closet, where he smoothed it out and hung it carefully on a wooden hanger.
'Oh, it didn't go too badly,' I said, my finger poised with conspicuous impatience on the line in Swann's Way where I'd left off in the spring of 1977.
'I met McWhirter at the Green Room,' he said airily, taking off his pants and clamping them authoritatively into a pants hanger. 'He didn't think it had gone all that well. He seemed pretty depressed, in fact. In the bars, only five people signed up for his big national strike. No revolt of the masses on Central Avenue.'
'Oh, really? You saw him? He told you that? When I left the Green Room at three-thirty, there were already six signed up.'
'Yeah,' he said, neatly folding his dirty shirt before placing it in the laundry hamper. 'But one guy changed his mind and came back and crossed his name off the list. McWhirter had a few choice words for the poor bastard too. It wasn't nice to see. I felt sorry for both of them.'
I said, 'Oh.'
He slipped out of his briefs. His cock was limp, shrunken, exhausted.
'I'm going to take a quick shower,' he said casually. What an act. 'And then let's fuck. '
I said, 'Wait.' My heart was thudding and snapping like my office air conditioner.
He turned in the bedroom doorway to face me. I said, 'How did your evening go, anyway? With Boyd-boy. You neglected mentioning that.'
'Oh, shit,' he said, shaking his head and looking wearily amused by it all. 'Boyd is such a flake.
I'll tell you all about it in a minute. Just hold on. Boy, do I stink!'
No doubt. He sped into the bathroom to, I assumed, scrub down his eyebrow.
I read in Swann's Way the words 'But, whereas' several times, then reinserted the yellowing bookmark. I waited. When I heard the water stop running, I opened the book and reread, 'But, whereas.'
'But, whereas.'
'But, whereas.'
'But, whereas.'
Timmy came back, theatrically erect. Quite the athlete, Timmy.
'I love your ass, Donald Strachey,' he said in a low voice, and dove at me with the concentrated enthusiasm he generally reserved for a misplaced article of clothing.
I said, 'Did you and Boyd-boy do it? You know-'it'?
The famous and ever-popular but-still-controversial-in-some-circles 'it'?'
He halted in midair, hung there briefly, then descended to his dumb, ugly puce shag rug I'd never liked.
