Heavy Water and Other Stories

STRAIGHT FICTION

IT ALL BEGAN that day in the bookstore coffee shop—when Cleve saw the young woman reading a magazine called Straight News. Or was it Straight Times? Straight News or Straight Times: one or the other. Take your pick.

Now Cleve liked to think of himself as a reasonably civilized guy. Live and let live, he’d say. He didn’t have any kind of problem with straights. Unlike that little brute Kico, for instance. Or unlike Grainge, who always… Cleve checked himself. Every chance he got, he was still thinking about Grainge. Grainge—oh, Grainge! “It’s over,” he murmured, for the ten-thousandth time; and then he obediently reminded himself that he was very happy with his current lover—a talented young muralist called Orv.

The young woman reached for her short espresso. Cleve proceeded with his Sumatra Lingtong. (Low acidity: Cleve was careful about such things.) He found that he was staring at her—found also that she was staring back, with intelligent defiance. Automatically Cleve bade his face to suffuse itself with tolerance and congeniality. And it worked out: there they sat, a table away, smiling at each other.

“Who would have thought it?” he said lightly. To strike up a conversation, hereabouts, was no big thing. This was the coffee shop of the Idle Hour bookstore. A bookstore coffee shop committed to good coffee (Coffee Boiled Is Coffee Spoiled). People were always striking up conversations. “Burton Else,” Cleve went on. “Burton. Burton Else for Christ’s sake.”

It took her a second to get his meaning. She pressed the magazine to her bosom and peeked down, reacquainting herself with its front cover. There was the tabloid-size photograph of Burton Else, the movie star, sashed with the diagonal caption: TOTALLY HET.

“You find it hard to believe?” she said.

“I guess not.”

“You’re surprised? Disappointed?”

“Nah,” said Cleve. Which wasn’t true. He was scandalized. “I saw his new one just last night,” he went on. That was true enough: Cleve and Orv, at the movies, with their popcorn and their Perriers. And up on the screen—Burton Else, your regular join-the-dots romantic lead. The usual kind of thing. Burton taking his young feature star Cyril Baudrillard to a disco opening. Burton and Cyril attending a yard sale, and encountering Burton’s ex. Burton cradling Cyril’s sweat-soaked nudity in the marmalade glow of the log fire, after that fight about the flower catalogs. “There he was up there,” said Cleve, “doing his dreamboat routine.”

“They say he has to be helped into his trailer after he does those love scenes. They give him a back rub and he does his breathing exercises and he’s usually okay.”

Cleve laughed. “You’re kidding. But he seems so…”

“What?”

“You know. So…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. So…”

“Hey there.”

Immediately Cleve sat to attention. The young woman was being joined by her young man. By her lover; this was instantly clear. Of course you saw it all the time these days (downtown, anyway), straights kissing in public, on the lips and everything—open mouthed, even with tongues, like a demonstration. Cleve was only thirty-eight, but in his lifetime people used to go to fucking jail for doing that. Or for doing what that portended. The young woman had her head tipped back. The young man was leaning over the side of her chair. Her face was small and round and candid, not pale, but evenly freckled—the freckles like asperities on the skin of a new potato. (Cleve found that he thought about food, or about cooking, almost as often as he thought about Grainge.) As for the young guy—dark, compact, tight-jawed, plump-lipped—and yet, in Cleve’s estimation, somehow totally un-Hot. Uh-oh: more kissing. And more whispering. He listened. It wasn’t intimacies they were exchanging. More like duty-roster stuff. Whose turn it was to do what.

In fact Cleve was grateful for the diversion. It gave him a chance to contemplate the visage of Burton Else— the shamed visage of Burton Else, which smiled joshingly on, over and above the block capitals that sliced his chest in two. At the bottom of the page it said: BURTON ELSE ACTOR. ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE. ROARING STRAIGHT. Cleve really was scandalized. The thing being… he’d been told more than once that he resembled Else. And been pretty pleased to hear it. As the young woman whispered to her young man, her fingertips steadying his cheek, Cleve felt marginalized, and outnumbered. The young woman; the young man; and now Burton. Suddenly he saw himself from the outside. Cleve: his cropped and kitteny black hair, his heavy dark glasses, his halter straps, his gold popper holder, his rectangular mustache, his fishnet tank top. In accordance with the latest Look, he resembled a half-dressed policeman getting ready for night shift. Burton Else was clean-shaven, for some reason. Or was that a tell?

He was about to return to his book and his Sumatra Lingtong when the young woman said, “I was talking to…”

“Cleve,” said Cleve.

“Cressida,” said Cressida. “And this is John.”

John nodded humorlessly at Cleve, who nodded back.

“We were talking,” said Cressida, “about the outing of Burton Else.”

“And how did Cleve feel about that?”

“Cleve didn’t yet say.”

And Cleve thought: eek. He leaned sideways and shrugged loosely. One thing about Cleve: he was more thoughtful than he looked. Being more thoughtful than he looked was getting easier all the time, as Cleve continued to alarm himself with the development of his upper body, down at the gym off Washington Square. Recently Orv had taped him with the camcorder—at Watermill, on the Island, trudging along the shore with Arn and Fraze. Cleve’s neck was astounding, especially when viewed from the rear. His back seemed to go all the way up to his head, after the brief and minor interruption of his shoulders. He said, “Well, let me see how I feel about it. Burton Else… Okay, so Burton’s straight. Big deal. It’s a secret, not a deception. He’s not one of those video preachers. Calling down hellfire on, uh, ‘alternative lifestyles.’ It’s not like he’s some hypocritical politician.”

“That’s right,” said John. “It’s like he’s some hypocritical movie star.”

The way he said that, the way he leaned into it, leaned his practiced intensity right into it: Here we go, thought Cleve. John, the young man—Cleve now saw that he had a speckly, rough-barked layer to his face. He was young but already weathered. Cleve said, perhaps not so thoughtfully, “Burton—guess Burton could lose a lot of fans if this gets around. He could lose roles. Supposing it’s true.”

John said, “Wait a second. You don’t think Burton isn’t promoting something? Like a lifestyle, for instance? He’s up there forty feet high. With his black cap and his tank top. A regular bees-knees faggot.”

“John.”

“And you’re worried about his roles? His fans? Fuck his fans.”

“Hey,” said Cleve. Again he felt unfairly singled out. He turned his head and saw that an elderly gentleman at an adjacent table was frowning at him with comradely indignation. The old guy looked like a half-dressed policeman too, but fatter and grayer and balder (and even more junior in rank) than the half-dressed policeman Cleve looked like; he wore a black T-shirt with the white lettering: THE MORE HAIR I LOSE, THE MORE HEAD I GET. Cleve said, “Come on, John. Is Burton obliged to have a position?” His tone became mildly imploring. “Doesn’t Burton have a life here? Is he just a symbol, an icon, or is he a human being? Doesn’t Burton—?”

“Fuck Burton. And if you can’t see that he’s a disgrace to his orientation, and an impostor, and a kind of preacher, as well as a jerk, then fuck you too, Cleve.”

“John,” said Cressida.

But with a quake of crockery and a flourish of his (grimy) mac tails—John was gone.

“I’m like, ‘Wow.’” This was Cleve.

“I’m sorry—he’s very active.” This was Cressida.

They looked at each other. They were two of a kind; there was unanimity.

“You get that way. Forgive us,” she said. She was gathering her things: her bag, her book, her magazine.