'Oh. Oh, please.'
I hardly believed I had uttered anything so callously puerile to Callahan, no matter how offhand. I knew that it would not have passed muster at Georgetown, to which Timmy returned every five years along with other alumni to have the gilt on his high moral tone freshly applied, and I doubted the argument would even get by at Rutgers anymore. But I played out my assigned role in our customary dialectic nonetheless, and said, 'Progress is necessarily messy. Simply getting straight America's casual acceptance of gay people requires a lengthy battle in which collateral damage is inevitable. Some people are going to get hurt.
But it's necessary and it'll all be seen to have been worth it in the end.'
He made a little explosion of air that sounded like 'Sploooph.' He said, 'I thought you were in favor of the all-volunteer army.
And I know you're against cruelly mindless euphemisms.'
'Yes, I am against conscription,' I said, 'unless people are routinely offered a choice to do something nonmilitary that will contribute to the common weal. And I'm not even so sure about that.'
'Right, you're not so sure. Because you believe that in a civilized society people should pay taxes-even plenty of taxes-to buy civility and to help out the unlucky, but otherwise people who obey just laws should be pretty much left alone. I've heard you say that.'
'Yup. Pretty much.'
'So if the government of a nation that calls itself civilized should let people alone, why shouldn't John Rutka let people alone?'
He raised his voice, a rare occurrence.
I'd had enough. 'Well, on second thought, maybe you're right. As usual.'
He snorted and began gathering up the soiled china and utensils. 'Donald, I cherish you.' He snorted again and turned on the hot-water tap all the way, as his mother had taught him, to prepare for scalding the dishes and cleansing them of the Trichomonas, cholera, scurvy, and athlete's foot that surely were lurking there. He said, 'So it sounds as if you're going to go to work for this man you disagree with and don't like. Why?'
'I've worked for lots of people I disagreed with and didn't like. If I hadn't, I'd've starved.'
'But this is a special situation. And I know you don't need the money. What you made from the Hapgoods should carry you well into the fall.' This was a recent case wherein I discreetly recovered a purloined family portrait-the grandmother of a Presbyterian grande dame from Latham in a pose startling even by present-day standards and barely imaginable in 1878, the year of its creation-and received for my efforts an appropriately obscene fee.
'No, I don't need the money,' I said. 'Though Rutka claims he can afford it and he's paying me.'
The scalding process began; you could almost hear the little screams of the rinderpest. 'Then why are you doing it?' he said.
'Three reasons. One, I don't need the money now, but
I might need it later. This is a chancy business. The second reason is, Rutka is in danger and he's frightened. He needs protection
— not from criticism or maybe even from the odd sock in the jaw. But he does not deserve to be shot and killed.'
'That's two reasons. What's the third?'
I knew he'd guess. 'It's the least important of the three.'
'Uh-huh.'
'You don't know?'
The faucet was shut off, the cloud of steam began to dissipate, and he looked at me. 'You want to get a look at his files.'
'I'm curious. I admit it.'
He began to laugh. 'People deserve their privacy. Except you'd like to get just one little peek.'
'Something like that.'
'I know what you mean. Naturally I recognize the impulse.'
'Except you would never act on it, would you?'
He thought about this. 'I can't say never. I'm not perfect.'
'Yes, but your imperfections lie in other areas.'
This was irrelevant and unfair and I wasn't sure why I said it. He knew exactly what it meant, and briefly he was struck uncharacteristically speechless.
Timmy's imperfections had been a sensitive topic in recent months. The previous spring he had had a terrified hour-and-forty-five-minute sexual assignation with a diminutive huge-eyed Bengali economist who was passing through town. It had been Timmy's first lapse from his fourteen-year pledge of sexual fidelity. (I had made no such promise, and we had survived the onset of the HIV plague by the skin of my teeth.) Though health precautions were taken, he had done it, he immediately confessed, when he'd become unhinged, he said, by the little professor's uncanny resemblance to the district poultry officer Timmy had had the unrequited hots for in Visakhapatnam in 1968.
It may have been the briefest midlife-crisis fling on record, and it was only minimally hurtful to me-except to the extent that the incident was so out of character I feared that Timmy might be coming down with Alzheimer's, rare as it is among men in their forties. The event passed quickly by and was rarely referred to anymore, except on those occasions when I would get to point out that even a man educated by Jesuits could make a mistake. 'Yes, every fourteen years,' was the usual reply to this.
This time he was late for work, he said, and didn't have time for a nervous jocular exchange at his expense. He trotted upstairs to finish getting into his legislative aide's duds. With an hour to kill before I headed out to Rutka's house in Handbag, I read the newspaper account of Rutka's run-in with 'an assailant possibly angered by exposure of his homosexuality.' When Timmy sped through, I kissed him, careful not to leave egg on his lip. end user
4
The first thing Rutka said was, 'I want to write you a check for the retainer. Will two thousand be enough?'
'We can work that out. Five hundred should do for now. Tell me about your visit from the Handbag police.'
It was mid-morning, cloudless and heating up fast, and we were seated on the screened-in back porch of the old Rutka home on Elmwood Place, a short street of angular frame single-family homes separated by narrow lawns and driveways leading to small garages at the rear of each property. The elms of the street name apparently had succumbed to blight, but young maples lent some shade to the well-kept houses, whose cozy front porches were fortified by puffy hydrangea bushes and bosomy heaps of respectable shrubs. It felt like an unlikely locale for a Queer Nation headquarters, but maybe that was the point.
Each house had a concrete walk leading down to the street, like a tasteful necktie. Some were lined with zinnias and marigolds in lurid full bloom. The flowers lent a note of welcome to the neighborhood, though as I'd driven up no human being was visible. Up the street a gray cat had scratched a hole in a garbage bag left at curbside and was rummaging through the spillage. The only sound was from a dozen or so air conditioners scarfing up what was left of the Mideastern oil reserves in atonal tandem.
Rutka, pale but otherwise shapely and fit in cut-offs and a tank top, was sprawled along an old metal fifties- era porch glider on a bed of cushions that looked as if they'd been dragged down from the attic every summer since the glider was purchased. His wounded appendage lolled over the side of the glider below a sinewy leg and well- turned, muscular thigh that was not the result of a health-club regimen, I guessed, but of a decade of plowing up and down hospital corridors eight to twelve hours a day.
I sat in a metal rocker and helped myself from time to time to an M amp;M from a large dish on an end table next to Rutka. He ate them by the fistful, as if the medical advice he'd received had been to stay off the wounded foot and eat plenty of candy. My peripheral vision searched his torso for love handles but none were visible. I
