Ideas of Heaven Page 3

  When we went home together, after the party, we got along fine. For a shy person, he was confident and happy in bed (I was the rough and bumbling one). I could still recount, if I had to, the sequence of things we did that night. I have done them many times since—there isn’t that much variety in the world—but the drama was particular and stunning just then. In the morning I made him a very nice breakfast (my wife had been a terrible cook) and he ate two helpings of my spinach omelet as if he could not believe his good luck. He had a dry sense of humor and he was quite witty about my makeshift housekeeping and my attempts at décor, the white fake-fur rug and the one wall painted black. We put on music and we hung around, smoking cigarettes and reading the paper all afternoon. Just passing the time.

  I was working in a show on Broadway, skip-skipping across the stage in cowboy chaps and swinging my silver lariat, and he came to see me perform. I suppose the other dancers knew who he was to me. Backstage everybody shook his hand and asked him if it wasn’t the dumbest musical he’d ever seen. The girls told me later how nice he was. And sometimes I was in his world, when we went to hear music in the Village or once up to a club in Harlem. Anyone who saw us probably thought I was just some white theatre guy wanting to be hip. Had we been a man and a woman, we would have had a much harder time walking together on the street.

  Andre stayed with me more nights than not, even if he didn’t live with me. But he had to go home to practice. A trumpet is not an instrument that can be played casually in someone’s apartment. His own place, up in Morningside Heights, was in the basement (a great cheap find), and he had rigged up a booth lined with acoustic ceiling tile and squares of carpeting for his hours of practice. His chicken coop, I called it, his burrow. I never stayed over with him and I only visited him there once, but I liked to imagine him hunched over his horn, blowing his heart out in that jerry-built closet.

  He wasn’t getting gigs yet, but sometimes he sat in with musicians he’d met. To this day, I couldn’t say whether he was a great player or not. When he was playing with anyone, I worried like a parent—I looked around to see what people thought. He was okay, I think, but so modest and unflashy that he could be taken for a competent dullard. But he had a rare kind of attention, and sometimes, the way he worked his way in and the way he twisted around what they’d been playing made the other players smile. He was just learning.

  In the daytime, he worked as a salesman in a men’s clothing store in midtown. Once I walked in the door and pretended to be a grouchy rich man who needed an ugly suit to wear to divorce court. Something hideous, please, something you wouldn’t wear to a dogfight. This cracked Andre up. He laughed through his teeth, hissing softly. That’s how bored he was there. He introduced me to the manager as his crazy friend Duncan, this lunatic he knew.

  He was quite a careful dresser, from working in that place. A little too careful, I thought, with his richly simple tie and his little handkerchief folded in his pocket. I used to tell people he ironed his underwear, which he stoutly denied. For Christmas he bought me a silk shirt that probably looked silly on me but felt great. We had dinner that day with two of Andre’s friends, Reg and Maxmilian. I made a goose, a bird none of us had ever had before. We kept goosing each other all night, a joke that wouldn’t die. Reg got particularly carried away, I thought. Andre teased me about the ornateness of my meal—the glazed parsnips, the broccoli polonaise—wasn’t there a hog jowl in anything? He wanted the others to be impressed with me, and they sort of were. Andre asked me to put on the record of Aida he liked, the one with Roberta Tebaldi.

  “Renata Tebaldi,” I said.

  “Rigatoni Manicotti,” he said. “What do I care what her name is?”

  But I took to calling him Roberta after that. Just now and then, to needle him. Pass the peas, Roberta. Like that.

  We were at the Village Vanguard with a couple he knew when I said, “Roberta, you want another drink?” He turned his beautiful, soft eyes on me in a long stare and said, “Cool it.”

  I did cool it then, but not for long. He was sleepy in the club, since he had been working at the store all day, and at one point he slumped back in his chair and dozed. Anyone who noticed probably thought he was on drugs. I sang into his ear in a loud, breathy falsetto, “Wake up, Roberta.”

  The week after this, he refused to take me with him when he went out with his friends. He announced it at breakfast on Saturday. “You don’t know respect,” he said. “Stay home and study your manners.”

  He wouldn’t say any more. He never got loudly upset as my wife had. I couldn’t even get a good fight going.

  “Go,” I said. “Get away from me then.”

  But that night, when the show let out, I took off my satin chaps and rubbed away the greasepaint, and I went walking up and down Bleecker Street, checking out all the clubs that Andre might be in. I just wanted him to be sweet to me again. I wanted to make up. I walked through dark crowded cellars, peering at tables of strangers who were trying to listen to some moody trio. I must have looked like a stalking animal.

  What if he never came back to me? He wasn’t in four places I tried, and at the fifth, I sat at the bar and drank a scotch, but I couldn’t stay still. I walked all the way to the river, close to tears. I had never seen myself like this, wretched and pathetic. I could hardly breathe, from misery. I just wanted Andre to be sweet to me again. I couldn’t stand it this way.

  On the pier I picked up a guy, an acne-scarred blond in a baseball jacket. I didn’t have to say more than hi, and I brought him home in a cab to my place in the West Forties. He was just a teenager—the luxury of a cab ride impressed him. I could see he was less excited when we got to my neighborhood with its hulking tenements. My block looked gloomy and unsafe, which it was.

  And there on my stoop was Andre, waiting. I was still in the cab paying the driver when I saw him. The boy had already gotten out.

  Andre’s face was worn and tired—perhaps he had been sitting there a long time—and the sight of us seemed to make him wearier still. He sighed and he shook his head. I put my arm around the boy and I walked him past Andre to my front door, where I fished for my key without turning around.

  I could hear Andre’s footsteps as he walked away—east down the street, toward the subway. I did not turn my head at all. What control I had, all of a sudden. I who had been at the mercy of such desperate longing, such raging torment.

  When I got the boy inside, I made him some pancakes—he looked hungry—and then we fooled around a little, but I wasn’t good for much. He fell asleep, and I got him up at dawn and gave him some money. He didn’t argue about the amount and he understood that he had to leave.

  And what did I do as soon as he was gone? I called Andre on the phone. How sleepy and startled his voice sounded. I loved his voice. When I said hello, he hung up.

  And then I really was in hell, in the weeks after that. I woke up every morning freshly astonished that Andre was still gone and that my suffering was still there, the deadweight in my chest. When I phoned Andre again, I got him to talk, and he was rational enough, but he wasn’t, he said, “very interested anymore.” His language was tepid and somewhat formal. “Not about to embark on another disaster,” was a phrase he used in a later conversation. That time I told him he sounded like a foreign exchange student.

  So we stopped talking. Even I could see it was no use. But he was never out of my thoughts, he was always with me. I would be on the subway and realize I had shut my eyes in dreamy remembrance of a particular scene of us together, Andre on his knees to me in the shower. How languorous and smug my expression must have looked to riders on the A train. How disappointed I felt when I saw where I was.

  I might have gone to find him at work, but I knew how he would be with me. If he was frosty over the phone, he would be a parody of polite disgust in the store. I hated the thought of actually seeing him like that, and I didn’t want to hear what I might say back.

  I didn’t really have many friends to talk to. I wa
s late getting to the show a few times, from not really caring and from sleeping too much, and I was fined and given a warning. I was very angry at Andre when this happened. He didn’t care what he had done to me. I went down to City Hall, to the Buildings Department, and I looked up the deed to Andre’s building to see who the owner was. I phoned the realty company to complain that someone was playing a trumpet very loudly at all hours of day and night. I phoned again and gave them another name, as a different angry neighbor. I phoned again.

  On the last of these phone calls a secretary told me that the tenant had been advised he could remain in the apartment only if he ceased to be a noise nuisance, and he had chosen to leave, without paying his last month’s rent. I was quite satisfied when I heard this—how often does anything we do in this life attain its goal? And then I remembered that I didn’t know now where to find Andre. I didn’t have his home phone number anymore.

  I wanted to howl at the irony of this, like an anguished avenger in an opera. How had I not known better? Well, I hadn’t. There was no new listing for him in any of the boroughs. And he was not at his job either. Another salesman in the store thought maybe Andre had gone back to Chicago, where his family was. I didn’t see him anymore, not on the street, not in clubs, not in bars. Not then, not later. Perhaps he became famous under another name. Who knows how his playing got to sound? Not me.

  All these years later, I don’t know if he is still alive. A lot of people aren’t, as it has happened. But it may well be that he settled down—he was like that—and a long and sedate monogamy would have kept him safe, if he found someone early, and he probably did. I wasn’t with any one person, after him. I didn’t even look for such a thing. I went to bars and took home the occasional hot stranger, and I kept to myself a good part of the time.

  For a decade or so I got work pretty steadily on Broadway. Those weren’t bad years for musicals, but there was a lot of junk too. I was hired to slink around as a thirties gangster, to be jaunty with a rake in my hand as a country yokel, and to do a leaping waltz as a Russian general, clicking the heels of my gleaming boots. Only a few male dancers got to be real stars, like Geoffrey Holder or Tommy Tune, and I suppose for a while I thought I could be one of them. I had a strong, clean style and I was a great leaper. Nothing else anywhere did for me what that sensation of flying did. But my career never made its crucial turn, and then I got older than anyone wanted for the chorus line.

  Which was not even that old. I was surrounded, however, by lithe and perfect young boys. Quite vapid, most of them, but decently trained. I was not even attracted to these children, as a rule. Probably I looked like some evil old elf to them, a skinny, brooding character with upswept eyebrows.

  For a while I tried teaching in a dance studio, but I didn’t get along with the director. She gave me the beginners’ classes, and the students really didn’t want any grounding in technique, they only wanted someone assuring them they could be professionals overnight. “Ladies,” I would say to them, “get those glutes tucked in before you practice your autographs.”

  I didn’t last that long at the school, and so then I tried going on my own as a coach. I put an ad in a few papers bragging about my years of experience and my secrets for imparting the skills of theatrical success. I knew now what people wanted to hear. And I did get phone calls. My students were ninnies, the lamest of stagestruck clodhoppers, but they showed up for lessons with brimming eagerness, and I made what you could almost call a living.

  There was one man I was very drawn to, during this time. He was a stockbroker I met in a coffee shop, a balding boy in a beautiful suit who asked what I was reading in my newspaper. I took him to the Jersey shore for Labor Day Weekend. He was too quiet in the rented car on the drive out, and I had to work to keep the conversation up. We walked the boardwalk, being dreary together, and on Sunday morning we had a short but insulting fight over something he didn’t want me to do in bed. He didn’t really like me, past a certain point.

  And I paid for that weekend too, for the rental car and the hotel on the beach and the dinners of steak and lobster tails. He was younger than I was but he might have chipped in. I remembered those expenses with some bitterness, when my pool of students began to drop that year. I had to borrow from anyone I knew just to get by.

  In the end I gave up the studio, gave up the whole idea of teaching. I got a job in an agency booking dancers for clubs. Go-go girls, in spangled underwear and little white boots. I was the man the girls talked to after they read the classified and came into the office, nervous and flushed or tough and scowling. I sent them to clubs in the outer boroughs, airless caves in the Bronx with speakers blaring disco and red lights on the catwalk. My temper was so bad that people did what I told them, which was the agency’s idea of sterling job performance. I was a snarling jerk in these years. Contempt filled my every cell; I was fat as a tick on contempt.

  These were not good years, and my drinking got out of hand. One night in a bar, a man threw a chair at me and split open my head. When I missed two weeks’ work, the agency hired someone else while I was gone, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. It was not a clean or soft business. With my head still shaved and bandaged, I went back to the bar, itching for more trouble, but instead I ran into a dancer I used to know in my Broadway days. We were too old to want to pick each other up, but when I complained of being broke, he told me about a job at the union, answering phones and filing, if I didn’t think that was beneath me.

  I did, but I took the job anyway. I used to say the work was bearable because of all those pert young boys who came into the building, but in fact I was in the back offices, hovering over ledgers, and, in later years, facing a computer screen. It was a painless job, a reasonable thing to do until I found something else, and then it became what I did.

  I didn’t go to bars after a while. We knew at the union how many people were dying, even before the epidemic unfurled its worst. Cruising had not been full of glory for me anyway, so I stayed home and counted myself one of the lucky ones. Staying home suited me. I read more books, and I had a few regular outings. I had brunch once a month with a few theatre people I still knew. Through the union I got tickets to plays and sometimes operas. And I helped out backstage at some of the AIDS benefits we sponsored.

  In the early years a lot of big names pitched in at these benefits, but later too there were people who were impressive in rehearsals. I stayed extra hours one night to listen to a tenor with a clear, mellow voice—he was singing a cycle of songs written by a composer who had just died of AIDS. The accompanist was an idiot and they had to keep repeating the first song over and over. The singer was a puny, delicate boy, with pale eyebrows and colorless hair in a crewcut. He closed his eyes as he sang—not good form on stage, but affecting nonetheless.

  During the break I told him to keep his eyes open, and he said, “Yes, yes. You’re right.”

  “Your Italian sounds good though,” I said.

  “I lived in Rome for a year,” he said. “It was my idea for Jonathan to set these poems.”

  The composer had been his lover—I knew this, someone had told me—and the tenor sang with a mournful longing that was quite beautiful. Amor m’ha fatto tal ch’io vivo in foco, he sang. Love has made me live in ceaseless fire. I myself had xeroxed the text for the programs.

  His name was Carl and he was young, still in his twenties. Recent grief had crumpled his face and left a faint look of outrage around his eyes. I began to bring him glasses of water during his break and to keep advising him. Look at the audience. Watch your diction. He was quite professional about the whole thing, and he only nodded, even when I praised him.

  He let me take him out for a drink after the next rehearsal. We were in an overpriced bar in the theatre district, full of tourists. He ordered a Campari and soda. “Isn’t that a summer drink?” I said. It was the middle of February.

  “It makes me happy to drink it,” he said. “It makes me think of Italy.” As I might have guess
ed, he had gone there to study voice and he had met his lover Jonathan there. “The light in Rome is quite amazing,” he said. “Toasty and golden. Too bad it’s so hard to describe light.”

  He was a boy romantic. Every day he and Jonathan had taken a walk through a park with a beautiful name, the Dora Pamphilj or the Villa Sciarra or the Borghese Gardens, and they had poked around in churches to gaze at Caravaggios or had sat eating gelato in front of some ravishing Bernini fountain. I knew only vaguely what all this was. He glistened and pulsed liked a glow-worm, remembering it. I did not think any place could be that perfect, and said so.

  “It’s not,” Carl said. “It can be a nightmare city. Noisy, full of ridiculous rules and only one way of doing things, and those jolly natives can be quite heartless. But because Jonathan is dead, I get to keep it as my little paradise.”

  “Il paradiso,” I said, dumbly, in my opera Italian.

  He asked me if I had ever toured when I was a dancer. “Only to Ohio and Kentucky,” I said. “Nothing exotic. I just remember how tiring that road travel was.”

  “What keeps me going,” he said, “is poetry. I make sure to have a book with me at all times.”

  I pictured him reading a beat-up paperback of Whitman while everyone else slept on the tour bus. But his favorite poet, he said, was Gaspara Stampa, the Italian whose sonnets I had heard him sing. “She’s sort of a 1500s version of the blues,” he said. “Love has done her wrong but she’s hanging in there. She thinks all women should envy her because she loves so hard.”