After one drink, they put Ida and Cass in a cab, together. Ida said, “Now don’t you wake me up when you come falling in,” and Cass said, “I’ll call you sometime tomorrow.” They waved to their women and watched the red lights of the cab disappear. They looked at each other.
“Well!” Vivaldo grinned. “Let’s make the most of it, baby. Let’s go and get drunk.”
“I don’t want to go back into Benno’s,” Eric said. “Let’s go on over to my place, I’ve got some liquor.”
“Okay,” said Vivaldo, “I’d just as soon see you pass out at your place as have to drag you to your place.” He grinned at Eric. “I’m very glad to see you,” he said.
They started toward Eric’s house. “Yes, I’ve wanted to see you,” said Eric, “but”—they looked at each other briefly, and both smiled—“we’ve been kept pretty busy.”
Vivaldo laughed. “Good men, and true,” he said. “I certainly hope that Cass isn’t as — unpredictable — as Ida can be.”
“Hell,” said Eric, “I hope that you’re not as unpredict able as I am.”
Vivaldo smiled, but said nothing. The streets were very dark and still. On a side street, there stood a lone city tree on which the moonlight gleamed. “We’re all unpredictable,” he finally said, “one way or another. I wouldn’t like you to think that you’re special.”
“It’s very hard to live with that,” said Eric. “I mean, with the sense that one is never what one seems — never — and yet, what one seems to be is probably, in some sense, almost exactly what one is.” He turned his half-smiling face to Vivaldo. “Do you know what I mean?”
“I wish I didn’t,” said Vivaldo, slowly, “but I’m afraid I do.”
Eric’s building was on a street with trees, westbound, not far from the river. It was very quiet except for the noise coming from two taverns, one on either far corner. Eric had visited each of them once. “One of them’s gay,” he said, “and what a cemetery that is. The other one’s for longshoremen, and that’s pretty deadly, too. The longshoremen never go to the gay bar and the gay boys never go to the longshoremen’s bar — but they know where to find each other when the bars close, all up and down this street. It all seems very sad to me, but maybe I’ve been away too long. I don’t go for back-alley cock-sucking. I think sin should be fun.”
Vivaldo laughed, but thought, with wonder and a little fear, My God, he has changed. He never talked like this before. And he looked at the quiet street, at the shadows thrown by houses and trees, with a new sense of its menace, and its terrifying loneliness. And he looked at Eric again, in very much the same way he had looked at him in the film, wondering again who Eric was, and how he bore it.
They entered Eric’s small, lighted vestibule and climbed the stairs to his apartment. One light, the night light over the bed, was burning, “To keep away robbers,” Eric said; and the apartment was in its familiar state of disorder, with the bed unmade and Eric’s clothes draped over chairs and hanging from knobs.
“Poor Cass,” Eric laughed, “she keeps trying to establish some order here, but it’s uphill work. Anyway, the way things are between us, I don’t give her much time to do much in the way of straightening up.” He walked about, picking up odds and ends of clothing, which he then piled all together on top of the kitchen table. He turned on the kitchen light and opened his icebox. Vivaldo flopped down on the unmade bed. Eric poured two drinks and sat down opposite him on a straight-backed easy chair. Then there was silence for a moment.
“Turn out that kitchen light,” Vivaldo said, “it’s in my eyes.”
Eric rose and switched off the kitchen light and came back with the bottle of whiskey and put it on the floor. Vivaldo flipped off his shoes and drew his legs up, playing with the toes of one foot.
“Are you in love with Cass?” he asked, abruptly.
Eric’s red hair flashed in the dim light, as he looked down into his drink, then looked up at Vivaldo. “No. I don’t think I’m in love with her. I think I wish I were. I care a lot about her — but, no, I’m not in love.”
And he sipped his drink.
“But she’s in love with you,” said Vivaldo. “Isn’t she?”
Eric raised his eyebrows. “I guess she is. She thinks she is. I don’t know. What does it mean, to be in love? Are you in love with Ida?”
“Yes,” said Vivaldo.
Eric rose and walked to the window. “You didn’t even have to think about it. I guess that tells me where I am.” He laughed. With his back to Vivaldo, he said, “I used to envy you, you know that?”
“You must have been out of your mind,” said Vivaldo. “Why?”
“Because you were normal,” Eric said. He turned and faced Vivaldo.
Vivaldo threw back his head and laughed. “Flattery will get you nowhere, son. Or is that a subtle put-down?”
“It’s not a put-down at all,” said Eric. “But I’m glad I don’t envy you any more.”
“Hell,” said Vivaldo, “I might just as easily envy you. You can make it with both men and women and sometimes I’ve wished I could do that, I really have.” Eric was silent. Vivaldo grinned. “We’ve all got our troubles, Buster.”
Eric looked very grave. He grunted, noncommittally, and sat down again. “You’ve wished you could — you say. And I wish I couldn’t.”
“You say.”
They looked at each other and smiled. Then, “I hope you get along with Ida better than I did with Rufus,” Eric said.
Vivaldo felt chilled. He looked away from Eric, toward the window; the dark, lonely streets seemed to come flooding in on them. “How,” he asked, “did you get along with Rufus?”
“It was terrible, it drove me crazy.”
“I figured that.” He watched Eric. “Is that all over now? I mean — is Cass kind of the wave of your future?”
“I don’t know. I thought I could make myself fall in love with Cass, but — but, no. I love her very much, we get on beautifully together. But she’s not all tangled up in my guts the way — the way I guess Ida is all tangled up in yours.”
“Maybe you’re just not in love with her. You haven’t got to be in love every time you go to bed. You haven’t got to be in love to have a good affair.”
Eric was silent. Then, “No. But once you have been—!”
And he stared into his drink. “Yes,” Vivaldo said at last, “yes, I know.”
“I think,” said Eric, “that I’ve really got to accept — or decide — some very strange things. Right away.”
He walked into the dark kitchen, returned with ice, and spiked his drink, and Vivaldo’s. He sat down again in his straight chair. “I’ve spent years now, it seems to me, thinking that one fine day I’d wake up and all my torment would be over, and all my indecision would end — and that no man, no boy, no male—would ever have power over me again.”
Vivaldo blushed and lit a cigarette. “I can’t be sure,” he said, “that one fine day, I won’t get all hung up on some boy — like that cat in Death In Venice. So you can’t be sure that there isn’t a woman waiting for you, just for you, somewhere up the road.”