“Why do I have to take a bath?”
But she decides to go with Margaret, and runs after her and grabs on to her wool sash. Margaret blows on the incense stick she has just lit, and fans it in the air, and Beth, enchanted, follows her out of the room. She already feels at ease in the house, and she likes us all and wanders off with anyone gladly, even though she’s usually shy. Yesterday, Sol showed her how to punch down the bread before putting it on the baking sheet to rise once more. He let her smear butter over the loaves with her fingers and then sprinkle cornmeal on the top.
Sol teaches at the state university. He is a poet, and he has been hired to teach a course in the modern novel. “Oh, well,” he is saying now. “If I weren’t a queer and I’d gone into the Army, I guess they would have made me a cook. That’s usually what they do, isn’t it?”
“Don’t ask me,” Charles says. “I’m queer, too.” This seems to be an old routine.
Noel is admiring the picture frames. “This is such a beautiful place,” he says. “I’d love to live here for good.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Sol says. “With a lot of fairies?”
Sol is reading a student’s paper. “This student says, ‘Humbert is just like a million other Americans,’ ” he says.
“Humbert?” Noel says.
“You know—that guy who ran against Nixon.”
“Come on,” Noel says. “I know it’s from some novel.”
“
“Why don’t you quit that job?” Lark says. “You hate it.”
“I can’t be unemployed,” Sol says. “I’m a faggot and a poet. I’ve already got two strikes against me.” He puffs twice on the roach, lets it slip out of the clip to the hearth. “And a drug abuser,” he says. “I’m as good as done for.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, dear,” Charles says, putting his hand gently on Sol’s shoulder. Sol jumps. Charles and Noel laugh.
It is time for dinner—moussaka, and bread, and wine that Noel brought.
“What’s moussaka?” Beth asks. Her skin shines, and her hair has dried in small narrow ridges where Margaret combed it.
“Made with mice,” Sol says.
Beth looks at Noel. Lately, she checks things out with him. He shakes his head no. Actually, she is not a dumb child; she probably looked at Noel because she knows it makes him happy.
Beth has her own room—the smallest bedroom, with a fur rug on the floor and a quilt to sleep under. As I talk to Lark after dinner, I hear Noel reading to Beth:
I sit in Noel’s lap, looking out the window at the fields, white and flat, and the mountains—a blur that I know is mountains. The radiator under the window makes the glass foggy. Noel leans forward to wipe it with a handkerchief. We are in winter now. We were going to leave Vermont after a week—then two, now three. Noel’s hair is getting long. Beth has missed a month of school. What will the Board of Education do to me? “What do you think they’re going to do?” Noel says. “Come after us with guns?”
Noel has just finished confiding in me another horrendous or mortifying thing he would never, never tell anyone and that I must swear not to repeat. The story is about something that happened when he was eighteen. There was a friend of his mother’s whom he threatened to strangle if she didn’t let him sleep with her. She let him. As soon as it was over, he was terrified that she would tell someone, and he threatened to strangle her if she did. But he realized that as soon as he left she could talk, and that he could be arrested, and he got so upset that he broke down and ran back to the bed where they had been, pulled the covers over his head, and shook and cried. Later, the woman told his mother that Noel seemed to be studying too hard at Princeton—perhaps he needed some time off. A second story was about how he tried to kill himself when his wife left him. The truth was that he couldn’t give David his scarf back because it was stretched from being knotted so many times. But he had been too chicken to hang himself and he had swallowed a bottle of drugstore sleeping pills instead. Then he got frightened and went outside and hailed a cab. Another couple, huddled together in the wind, told him that they had claimed the cab first. The same couple was in the waiting room of the hospital when he came to.
“The poor guy put his card next to my hand on the stretcher,” Noel says, shaking his head so hard that his beard scrapes my cheek. “He was a plumber. Eliot Raye. And his wife, Flora.”
A warm afternoon. “Noel!” Beth cries, running across the soggy lawn toward him, her hand extended like a fisherman with his catch. But there’s nothing in her hand—only a little spot of blood on the palm. Eventually he gets the story out of her: she fell. He will bandage it. He is squatting, his arm folding her close like some giant bird. A heron? An eagle? Will he take my child and fly away? They walk toward the house, his hand pressing Beth’s head against his leg.
We are back in the city. Beth is asleep in the room that was once Noel’s study. I am curled up in Noel’s lap. He has just asked to hear the story of Michael again.
“Why do you want to hear that?” I ask.
Noel is fascinated by Michael, who pushed his furniture into the hall and threw his small possessions out the window into the backyard and then put up four large, connecting tents in his apartment. There was a hot plate in there, cans of Franco-American spaghetti, bottles of good wine, a flashlight for when it got dark . . .
Noel urges me to remember more details. What else was in the tent?
A rug, but that just happened to be on the floor. For some reason, he didn’t throw the rug out the window. And there was a sleeping bag . . .
What else?
Comic books. I don’t remember which ones. A lemon meringue pie. I remember how disgusting that was after
