Key West Tales Page 2
“You’re…?” the nurse asked, in a challenging, officious tone, with a full, deep voice, as if to say, “What do you want?”
“He’s Phillip,” Billy said from his bed. “This is Drew, Phil. She’s come to take care of me. She’s very sweet.”
The gender of the pronoun didn’t come from Billy as a slip of the tongue. He knew perfectly well what he was saying. He may have grown weak, but he was still Billy the Kid. Drew didn’t flick an eyelash.
The reports after that were that Drew was a wonder of thoughtfulness and solicitude. He wore membrane-thin rubber gloves for direct dealings with Billy, and he’d rub a little Oil of Olay on them, so that whenever he touched Billy, it was with fragrant satin hands. With bare hands he fixed delicacies like crème brûlée and raspberry mousse, and on Billy’s lunch and dinner tray, surrounding the dishes, he scattered emblems of the outdoor life that Billy had once loved—pastel bracts of bougainvillea, fragrant leaves of rose geranium, feathery ends of fresh dill, awakening buds of dwarf carnation: tiny gardens of distraction from the very thought of food. He sat by Billy’s bed and read aloud to him by the hour, books Billy wanted to experience for a second or third or fourth time: Armistead Maupin’s tales, David Leavitt’s first collection, the George Stambolian anthology, Andrew Holleran’s essays, and, most often, Edmund White’s pre-danger Joy. Straight books aplenty too, of course; above all, the poetry of Billy’s beloved Donne and Herrick. And it was true that Drew could lift Billy right out of bed like a baby to sit on what Drew called the “toidy.”
Billy seemed to accept all this as a matter of course. “She’s okay,” he would grudgingly say, in Drew’s presence, to Paul or to me. You never saw any sign of resentment from Drew of Billy’s belittling offhandedness.
Little Vanya Bronin was right, of course. We had all known it: There was a hard place in Billy Chapman. Paul told me that with all the excruciating compassion which he couldn’t help feeling for Billy’s waning—Billy’s terrifying evaporation—he nevertheless considered himself entitled to remember that Billy had done plenty of mean things in his time. You gave, he took. Paul says that in a way, this made Billy’s lot as a helpless, needful sickbed creature even more heartbreaking than it would have been had he been a less selfish person. Someone with that kind of ego needs power; it was terrible to see him without a shred left. You saw that he was driven to hurt with the only weapons left him—words—as if to unload on others some of the excess of his own psychic pain. It was not at all, though, a matter of his suddenly having found a way to exploit his pitiable state; he had always been a predator.
* * *
—
But I remember the afternoon when Paul came alone to have drinks at our house, and he told Sarah and me about Billy’s one tender spot. His only true love. It had gone on for thirty years. This was the one emotion in which Billy had invested, to be kept in trust for the rest of his life, his entire fund of altruism. In this single case he gave and gave—but it was all in his head, it was all a fantasy. He fell in love with a classmate in sixth grade, a boy named Sylvester Franklin. Billy and Sylly. Billy and his idol went off to Peddie together, and then to the University of Virginia. They never roomed together. Billy never declared his love. Paul isn’t sure whether Franklin ever even knew about Billy’s feelings, to say nothing of reciprocating them. Franklin went on to Johns Hopkins Medical School, became a surgeon, and took up practice in Charlotte—where, as it happened, both of Billy’s sisters had also settled. There Sylvester Franklin lived a straight life; he got married and had a son and a daughter. While, all those years, from a distance, Billy still hankered after him with something like the yearnings of an eleven-year-old.
Billy used to go to Charlotte to visit his sisters, one of whom he more or less liked, and one of whom he didn’t, just to be in the same town with the doctor. They saw each other rarely, as “old school friends.” Franklin’s children, and particularly the daughter, Molly, adored Billy. To them, he was jolly “Uncle William,” on the few occasions when he dined with the family. He knew how to make a quarter disappear in a person’s ear, to the amazement of young Tommy Franklin, and he showed Molly how to weave a cradle fit for the king of the cats with a loop of string. He safely lavished on the children the love that really belonged to their daddy.
Years later, a grown-up Molly came somehow to guess Billy’s secret; perhaps she sensed the padlock on Billy’s emotions, his rapt caution, when he was around her father. She was open with Billy about it, for which he was grateful beyond words. He had confessed the secret to Paul, long since, and so had had a neutral ear to pour it all out to, but being able to talk openly about the secret with Syl’s daughter, Molly, was to creep up to the very edge of the forbidden green glade of his dreams. Once—inflaming him, much too late, with absurd hopes—she said she had often wondered whether her so very conventional father had, as she put it, “a hidden bohemian side.”
About four years ago, long before he tested positive, Billy developed a sudden severe back pain, and it turned out that he was going to have to have his gallbladder removed. He called Sylvester Franklin and begged him to do the operation, and on the basis of their long acquaintance, the doctor arranged a bed for him, on astonishingly short order, in the Charlotte hospital. In the days before leaving for the surgery, Billy told Paul that he didn’t know whether he’d be able to trust himself on the operating table. “This’ll be the first moment of real intimacy,” he said, “that he and I have ever shared.” It would be the first time his beloved had ever touched him. He was terrified that with the palpations of the first routine exam, and then, God help him, in the operating room, all prepped in a hospital gown—and perhaps even under anesthetic!—his traitorous flesh, at Syl’s touch, might be aroused and give him away.
He never told Paul how it turned out, and Paul, with his good manners, never asked. I certainly would have, if I’d been Paul. Because that anxiety of Billy’s was such a clue to his vision of love: the be-all and end-all, for him, I always thought, was the joy and confident anticipation that came with tumescence. I suspect that whatever followed the pleasure of a buildup was never quite as good as it should have been. Billy lived for buildups. With Dr. Franklin he’d had one that lasted three decades—and led, at last, to a bizarre consummation of sorts on the operating table. The gallbladder removal was a medical success, in any case, and he soon bounced back, back then, into his usual robust well-being.
* * *
—
That he had to have an operation of that kind at all came as a great surprise, at the time. Having seen him so blighted in his last months, I find it hard now to recall his abounding health in the good years. He had, back then, a most cheerful and kindly rounded face, clean-shaven every day, near-chocolate irises, fine dark-brown hair with a hint of red in it. His frame was sound; clear skin lightly tanned; good proportions; his clothes always neat and clean, though he liked limp, unironed shirts. He was jaunty. He rode his bike all over hill-less Key West, and from a block away you’d hear him shouting greetings in his foghorn voice to his many pals. Late each afternoon he sat like a dignified, if slightly rakish, professor, with heavy horn-rims halfway down his nose, reading the paper and sipping coffee on the porch of Le Bar, on silent lower Duval, far away from Sloppy Joe’s noisy juvenility, which he hated.
Of course, he was a professor, and it’s hard to remember that now too. He’d had it made. His plum of a deal at Chapel Hill was to teach one term each year, the autumn semester, so he was free to spend most of the winter, and the spring and summer, in Key West. The sensible people in the university’s administration knew perfectly well that he was gay and weren’t inclined to do anything about it, so long as he remained—and he always did—meticulously discreet. He stored up his bulk oats for Key West.
His field was late-sixteenth-early-seventeenth-century poetry, the metaphysical and the Cavalier poets. Shakespeare and Milton he left to the men he called the “heavy
weights” on the faculty; his loves were Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Herrick, Lovelace, and Suckling, especially Donne and Herrick. A ridiculous syllabus, you’d think, for students growing up in a world of leveraged buyouts and genetic engineering and computer modems. They flocked to his two courses. He hooked them, to begin with, on the glorious love poems of the period—verse, he once said, that it would have taken a eunuch to try to deconstruct. I can imagine him in class—
These poor half-kisses kill me quite
Was ever man thus served?
One night about a month before the end, I walked in on Billy as he was reciting Donne to Drew, “The Relique,” in just above a whisper. He remembered every word of every surviving poem. His voice was three-quarters gone; you could see in his eyes the dying embers of his love for the quirky lines. Drew was weeping.
But I’m trying to think back to when he was healthy. I have in mind the years before 1981, which is when the terrible black flag of danger was first raised. He was wild. In his idle semesters, il dottore professore was a voluptuary. His goat legs danced every damn day and night. In the late mornings he’d put on a G-string and go for a swim at Higgs Beach—an excuse to parade out on what had come to be known as Dick Dock, where the guys lolled in as close to the altogether as the law would allow. He used to settle down to talk with strangers sometimes, but he never picked anyone up, he used to claim, before sundown. Sunday afternoons he showed up at the tea dances at the Atlantic Shores or at La Te Da. After dinner each night he started a round of the bars. His favorite places were No. 1 Saloon, a rackety and somewhat redneck joint, and Michael’s, with its garden of encounters. It was all a game of seven-card high-low, he’d say; you had to keep putting chips in the pot; you never knew—sometimes you came away with a beauty of a haul. Often he’d have a whirl at the Copa. Insatiable, he would take home, and then shed, one or sometimes more than one pickup—often outlanders who had come a-hunting in Key West, interlopers from the Christopher Street haunts in New York or the Castro in San Francisco, or New Orleans or Cincinnati or Seattle or wherever—and having dumped them, he would then go on, in the small hours, to the Club Baths’ shadowy orgy room.
Paul, a monogamist and a homebody already for over a decade back then, used to be put off by Billy’s satyrical boasts. Those were totally carefree days for adventurers, and it was inevitable, we now know, that someone like Billy would sooner or later become a nightshade, poisonous at the root and dangerous. It was Paul’s fateful good luck, as it has turned out, that with his cautious temperament and his modest needs, he was faithful, year in and year out, quarrels be damned, to his partner, Malcolm—pathetically faithful, Billy teased, though it would eventually mean that Paul would be spared while he would not. Paul and Billy couldn’t have been more different one from the other; theirs was a friendship of the magnetic attraction of opposite poles. Malcolm’s death of cancer five years ago tore Paul up so badly that he became a kind of hermit for a while, with nothing to fall back on save his spiky relationship with Billy, and it was not until Billy was himself close to death that Paul was able to—for surely he needed to—fall in love again.
* * *
—
Until he grew sick, Billy was fearless. One night three or four years ago, as he was walking up Duval with Vanya Bronin on the way to the night spot called The Monster, he became conscious of the sound of footsteps, quite a few of them, close behind them. You couldn’t easily have spotted either Billy or Vanya as gay, judging by looks and bearing, but here they were, two guys—of different sizes, kind of a funny combination—out on the town on a balmy night in swishy Key West. In short, a gang of spring-break gay-bashers thought they might have spotted a pair of fruits, and after tailgating the smaller one for half a block, they began muttering taunts and whistling soft catcalls at him. Very soon Billy turned on them and in his hoarse, strong voice told them to fuck off.
The college kids were startled, and you could see that they wondered whether the little bantam really belonged, as they had thought, with this rooster. Billy used to work out at The Body Shop; his shoulders and arms were impressive. He took a step toward the boys. That may have been a tactical error, because now you could hear a slight rustling of chicken feathers in their own group, and this made the two biggest of the heroes get some sort of adrenaline rush, and they jumped Billy, and then all five piled on. Vanya ran, to try to scare up a cop. Billy walked away a few minutes later with a black eye and a broken rib, but he left one of the shits curled up on the sidewalk, screaming and cupping his balls with his hands.
The cops got to the scene just in time. Billy cut out the report of the arrests on page two of the Citizen the next day and stuck it up on the door of his refrigerator with a heart-shaped magnet, and he flaunted his black eye around town, till it turned light purple and then pale mauve, a gradually fading medal of the endless wars.
I remember how bothered Paul was by Billy’s foolhardiness in challenging those freaks that night. “Jesus, Billy,” he said, “that’s how people get disemboweled.”
“Those children don’t carry knives,” Billy said, a bit smugly. “Not when they’re playing drop-the-hankie in little old Key West.”
Paul is probably the kindest person I know, but there is a passivity about him that I’m sure he himself must hate and that Billy used to lord it over. Paul grew up pampered in Boston; his father was a big-time lawyer and his mother was vaguely a collateral Cabot, or something like that. There was an always highly polished brass knob on the front door of their Louisburg Square house, and they belonged to St. Botolph’s and the Myopia Hunt Club. All this meant was that when Paul quit his loathsome job in the advertising business in his early thirties, to move to Key West, he had enough money to live on with a dependent lover; and yes, Malcolm moved down with him at the same time. Just to have something to do, Paul bought a part interest in a nice secondhand-book store on White Street. And that is where he and Billy got acquainted, one day when Billy was browsing. Their temperaments may have been different, but their reading tastes converged, and they began to see a lot of each other—always as mere friends but, as time passed, better and better friends.
* * *
—
So. Malcolm died. Paul grieved. Billy fell ill. Paul nursed him…and when, in the course of time, Paul hired Drew and flew off to Barbados with his found friend, Stanley, and then came back to town confirmed in a new love, he saw that the pattern of things had subtly changed. As soon as he arrived home, he hurried over to Billy’s. He was surprised to see that Drew had rearranged the furniture in Billy’s apartment; everything sparkled; there was a lemony odor of furniture oil in the air. “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” was going at low volume on the CD player. Paul was touched at how happy Billy was to see him. Drew hovered nearby as Paul and Billy talked—mainly, at first, about Paul’s recent trip.
They were chatting along inconsequentially when Billy suddenly broke away and said, in a voice that trembled ever so slightly, “Drew called Mildred in Charlotte.”
Paul, made suspicious by that delicate tremor, looked at Drew. Drew calmly nodded.
Paul said to Drew, “Did Billy ask you to call her?”
Billy didn’t let Drew answer. “No,” he said. “She”—he was pointing at Drew—“did it on her own.”
“I thought it was time they should come and see him,” Drew said.
Paul didn’t like the sound of that—the hint, within Billy’s earshot, that time was running out. This was shocking, anyhow. Taking it on himself to put in such a call was bad enough, but to make it worse, Mildred was by all odds the wrong sister to call. Billy always had spoken of one sister, Helen, as his “good sister”—relatively good, that is. Mildred was the awful one.
“This was very presumptuous of you, Drew,” Paul said.
“The patient’s family has to get involved,” Drew said. His voice—the voice of experience—had a little jitter in it now.
 
; “Please check with me before you do anything like that again,” Paul said.
Drew looked sharply at Billy. It seemed to Paul that Billy wilted a little under the heat of that glare. But rallying almost at once, Billy raised his head and said in his habitual gruff tone, “Listen, Drew. Paul here is the Designated Care Person. Don’t ever forget that.”
With that, Billy threw Paul one of his old-style roguish smiles. That silly phrase had come up jokingly one night, several months before, when Paul and Billy had been gingerly skating around some household questions that someone was going to have to deal with because Billy was losing ground—the paying of bills, laundry arrangements, a quarrel with City Electric. All of us in the support group had begun calling Paul “Billy’s D.C.P.”
“Of course,” Drew said, suddenly virtuous, seeming to accept the phrase as if it were an everyday usage in his high calling. “I’ll bear that in mind.”
What made this scene awkward for Paul was that he knew Drew was right. Billy had reached a stage at which he did need some touch with his family. There’s a mother-wit truth in that old lore about second childhood coming on before death. Not that Billy was dying yet, by a long shot—but everyone, certainly including Billy, was very much aware of what the outcome was going to be, in not too many months. A little boy had begun to peep out now and then from those disenchanted eyes.