Heavy Water and Other Stories

Just when it seemed that it could expand no further (where, he wondered, was all this coming from?), Cleve’s upper body burst into a whole new category of immensity. Hooked over the twin tureens of his laterals, Cleve’s arms now felt uselessly short, like those of a tyrannosaurus; and his head appeared to be no bigger than a grapefruit, forming a rounded apex to the broad triangle of his neck. Cressida was growing, too. On the street, on Greenwich Avenue, nobody looked at Cleve, because everybody looked like Cleve looked, but everybody looked at Cressida, whose sexual destiny, every day, was more and more candidly manifest. No need to out Cressida, not now… They didn’t talk about it. They talked about books. But as he escorted her from the Idle Hour, west, to the brink of Christopher Street, he noticed how people stared and pointed and whispered. Oh, Cleve knew what they were saying (he’d said such things himself, and not so long ago): reproducer, carrier, bearer, spawner, swarmer. On Greenwich Avenue, one time, an old woman called him a fertilizer. So they weren’t just staring at Cressida: they thought Cleve was straight. Walking beside her, now, his protective instincts were regularly roused; he could almost hear them, his instincts, waking up, yawning, stretching, rubbing their eyes. But he also felt that he was in the end zone of his fair-mindedness, his tolerance—his neutrality. How could you protect Cressida from what was coming her way? He experienced abject and lavish relief when, late in the fifth month, she left for San Francisco, to join John.

The supermarket tabloids were calling it the straight cancer and the straight plague, but even the New York Times, in its frequent reports and updates, struck a note of heavily subdued monotony that sounded to Cleve like the forerunner of full hysteria. A spokesman for the Bay Area Network of Straight Physicians noted that certain unsanitary practices, including (unavoidable) recourse to backstreet obstetricians, provided a “breeding ground” for disease. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Straight Women’s Health Crisis Center demanded prompt government funding to meet the emergency—a demand that was itself dismissed as an attempt to establish “the first straight pork barrel.” A spokesman for the Anti-Family Church Coalition predictably announced that the straight subculture had brought this scourge on itself. As for the new president, asked about the hundreds of known cases of ovarian infection, septicemia, and puerperal fever—all of them straight-related—replied, stoutly: “I wouldn’t know.”

Cleve and Cressida were still pals. They were pen pals. At the outset he imagined a correspondence of remarkable—indeed publishable—brilliance, all about fiction. But it didn’t turn out that way. Cressida’s letters, he soon found, were irreducibly quotidian. The cooker, the clothes dryer, the conversion of the box room—should she paint it blue or pink? “I know you’re interested in home improvement,” she wrote, “but this isn’t decoration. This is nesting.” Dutifully Cleve’s football jersey quaked over the kitchen table, leaning on the pad and ballpoint, as he attempted sophisticated riffs about exactly how Fanny Price made time with Mary Crawford, exactly how Frank Churchill strapped on Mr. Knightly. And the next morning what would he get but another nine-pager on Cressida’s health insurance or plumbing bills. Such was straight life. Her letters didn’t bore him. He found himself both gripped and frazzled. It was like getting hooked on one of those British soap operas they showed on cable: proletarian ups and downs, week in week out, relentless and endless, lasting longer than a lifetime. Cressida was really big now, splay-footed and short-winded, and constantly fanning herself.

Irv. Irv looked a lot like Cleve. Harv had looked a lot like Cleve, too, as had Grove, as had Orv. But Irv and Cleve (as Irv pointed out) were like the two sides of the same ass. That first time, when they groped toward each other through the fumes of Folsom Prison, Cleve felt he was walking into a mirror—reaching out and finding the glass was warm and soft. Sometimes, now, when Irv mislaid his house keys (which Irv was always doing), Cleve buzzed him up and waited for the knock and then went to the door, feeling entirely depersonalized, wiped out, to admit his usurper, his sharer, his shadow. It was like the recurring nightmare in the novels of William Burroughs, when your dreadful ditto comes calling. Burroughs! More straight fiction… Back in the first few days of their relationship, when they still had sex, Cleve and Irv always did it missionary, face-to-face; and Cleve was Narcissus, riveted to the reflection of his own watery being.

Halfway through the eighth month, with the onset of pelvic vascular congestion, the soap from San Francisco became sharply medicalized. Gone were the bland mentions of breathing exercises and health checks. In her letters Cressida now spoke of such things as vaginal cynosis, asymmetrical uterine enlargement, and low-albumin-count urinalyses. Cleve forged on with a florid account of his recent trip—with Irv—to Kampuchea. Then came the news that the baby was breached: It seemed that the baby intended to be born feet first… Late at night (Irv was elsewhere), Cleve was in the bathroom thinking about caesarean sections. He stood and faced the mirror. Behind which his medications were arranged in ranks, like spectators. Modern hypochondriacs are not just hypochondriacs. They are also Hypochondriacs, self-conscious representatives of a Syndrome. So even when they’re in great shape, and feeling in great shape, they remain terrified by their own suggestibility; scared of their own minds. Cleve went into the bedroom and, with the phone on his lap, touched the forbidden numbers.

“…Grainge?”

“Let’s not do this, Cleve.”

“…Grainge?”

“Cleve. Really.”

“I’m going to be good,” said Cleve in a childish voice. “I just wanted to ask you about something else.”

“Let’s make this quick, Cleve.”

“Grainge? Years ago, you had a straight phase, right? In your youth. Straight encounters or episodes.”

“What?”

“You were a kid. Just out of Boy Camp. Your first job. You were a caterer at that nurses’ college?”

“Oh that. Sure. So?”

“What did that tell you, Grainge?”

“It didn’t tell me anything. Listen, they got a name for it: situational heterosexuality.”

“But what did that mean, Grainge?”

“It didn’t mean anything. It meant any port in a storm. What’s up with you, Cleve?”

“Nothing. It’s okay. I’m good… Grainge?”

“Cleve. Really.”

“Grainge. Oh, Grainge…”

“Let’s not do this, Cleve.”

Soon afterwards he returned to the bathroom and got his mustache all warm and soapy. Then he reached for Irv’s straight razor. Cleve knew: there was a girl child coming. The wrong way up.

Overnight, as usual, spring turned into summer. The sun erected itself on silver filaments above the city and started cooking it, bringing out all its aromas and flavors and humors, the trace remains of a century’s pizzas and burgers and furters.

Attired in a magenta angel top and orange sateen boxing pants and high-sider tennis shoes with yard-long laces (and no socks), Cleve stood, one gruelly afternoon, outside the Idle Hour. Facing him, in her familiar black cotton dress, stood Cressida. They both had a battered look. Cressida, of course, had undergone the internal struggle of biology. Cleve was bruised, too, but more recently and obviously and superficially. He was with Irv. The night before, they had had a fistfight about which was better: Florence or Rome.

This reunion, so far, was being completely cool. Nothing personal. They strolled west. Cleve intended to accompany her as far as Seventh Avenue; then he would retrace his steps, and proceed to Magnificent Obsession. When he walked, Cleve’s thighs jostled and sideswiped one another very noticeably, and very loudly. His upper body was holding steady; but his lower body was hugely enlarged. Those thighs: he could only find room for them by standing with his feet about a yard apart.

“Whew,” he said on the corner, swaying there in the heat. “Good to see you again.” He reached out a hand, which she didn’t take.

“Wait,” said Cressida. “I thought you might like to see the baby.”

Christopher Street was not what he had built it up to be. For instance, it wasn’t even called Christopher Street, not this bit of it anyway: a new sign had been tacked over the old one like a temporary number plate. He might have asked his companion about that, but he didn’t need to. The straight district told you all about itself. It was out. SITE OF THE STONEWALL RIOTS, JUNE 27–29, 1969, said the white lettering