There was a photograph of her, a poor reproduction of her singing at a concert in Japan.
I’d never heard her sing, but I’d heard that Nevada wrote his famous song “Heart in My Mouth” about her.
“She’s the reason he doesn’t perform anymore,” Alex said.
“She’d already left him. He still gave concerts after she left him.”
“But he never got over her,” Alex said. “Didn’t you ever hear ‘You Took Me with You’ or ‘Tell Me Where You Are So I Know Where I Am’?”
I didn’t keep up on star gossip the way Alex did.
Then he reminded me the call was costing him money and we started making our weekend plans.
“You come in, okay?” he said. “We have a benefit on Sunday night. When you finish at Sob Story Saturday, hitch a ride in and we’ll have until late Sunday afternoon.”
Alex was playing Fortinbras in Hamlet.
He wasn’t just playing Fortinbras. He was also a soldier in one scene and a messenger in another. But it was his very first speaking role on Broadway. And it was Shakespeare again. Usually when he did Shakespeare, he was little more than a spear carrier.
We made arrangements for me to pick up a pizza and meet him at his apartment after the show.
I never went backstage. Even though Alex was “out” everywhere, I wasn’t. And I didn’t think it did him any good to have me showing up at the theater.
One time he’d played the hunk in Picnic in some amateur summer theater production. The actress starring with him blamed a bad review on Alex. Some small-town drama critic wrote that she was “wooden.” She claimed she couldn’t work up any emotion playing opposite a boy who preferred other boys to girls.
Alex laughed it off. He said, “When the lady doesn’t know how to dance, she says the musicians don’t know how to play.”
But I never forgot him telling me about it, and I wouldn’t hang around backstage for everyone to gape at me.
After I hung up, I went out to the kitchen, where Mom was making fried chicken for Nevada and his guests that night.
Nevada couldn’t stand cooking smells in Roundelay, so Mom made most meals in our cottage. Then Franklin would drive down in the Range Rover and pick everything up.
That was just fine with Mom. She said he played music full blast over the sound system, and as huge as Roundelay was, he had speakers in every room and insisted that all of them be on. If it wasn’t music, it was his French language tapes. He wanted to learn French for some mysterious visitor he was expecting that month.
“Bonjour, madame,” I said. “Comment allez vous?”
“Don’t,” she said. “I hear enough of that up there.”
“Alex sends his love.”
“Poor Alex in that hot city all summer!”
“Alex loves New York, Mom.”
“Does he have air conditioning?”
“In that dump on Avenue A? It’d blow all the fuses.”
I sat down and watched her. She could cook a four-course dinner for twelve and look as unruffled and neat as a clubwoman after a few rounds of bridge. Even her apron was spotless.
We were both blond and green eyed, but I had my father’s height, she said, and she hoped that was all I’d inherited from him. Any information I had concerning him was secondhand. He’d taken off before I’d learned to walk. The only photograph I had of him was taken outside a place in Las Vegas called Circus Circus. Mom liked to say it was snapped during one of the rare moments when he wasn’t inside a casino. He was a gambler—a grinning, lanky fellow wearing a black, open-collared shirt, white pants, and a belt with a big silver buckle.
Mom had been born in Atlantic City, and when the card players and one-armed bandits took over, she got a job at The Golden Nugget. Met him there, fell in love, married him.
Last we heard of him, he was running the roulette wheel on some ship, specializing in Caribbean cruises.
“I’ve been thinking about that word game Mr. Nevada played with you,” she said.
“Played on me,” I said. “He didn’t say what word described him.”
“I’m glad you said ‘torn,’ Lang.”
“Not about being gay, Mom. About coming out. Sometimes I feel as though I’m living this lie. Other times I feel I should just keep my mouth shut.”
“I’m glad you told me, but I don’t see why it has to be anybody else’s business…. And I still think it’s too soon for you to make up your mind about being gay.”
“How old were you when you made up your mind you were straight?”
She sighed and said, “All right. I don’t have time for one of your gay pride lectures, honey. I have to finish this chicken. Can you lend a hand?”
While we were loading up the tray, I said, “What word would you use to describe yourself?”
She came up with the same word I’d told Alex I’d answered. Content.
“Mr. Nevada is paying me more than I ever got before, for doing something I love doing…and you’re included. That’s contentment,” she said. “And I’m happy. Is that the same thing as content?’
“I’d say it’s synonymous.”
“So be it,” she said. “All goes well.”
I could look out the window and see the dandelions in the field, where Franklin had warned us there were sometimes snakes.
At the end of that summer I often thought about that moment.
The flower heads had turned into the white golf-ball-sized bunches of seeds that floated about in the wind like tiny parachutes. Gliding under them, unseen, were the long lengths slipping out in the sun for some warmth before they sneaked back into their crevices.
Fluff flying above the mysteries beneath them.
My mother and I, content, happy. What we couldn’t see was all around us, but it was hidden, waiting to surprise us if we moved in its direction.
And we would.
FOUR
BEFORE ALEX I’D NEVER BEEN in a relationship, never worried about looking faggy, even though when I was a
