“O.K.,” I say, and take the joint from him. Half of it is left when I take it. Half an inch is left after I’ve taken two drags and given it back.
“More surprised still if you’d shaken the ashes into the saucepan.”
“You’d tell people I’d done it when they’d finished eating, and I’d be embarrassed. You can do it, though. I wouldn’t be embarrassed if it was a story you told on yourself.”
“You really understand me,” Freddy says. “It’s moon-madness, but I have to shake just this little bit in the sauce. I have to do it.”
He does it.
Frank and Tucker are in the living room. Just a few minutes ago, Frank returned from getting Tucker at the train. Tucker loves to visit. To him, Fairfield County is as mysterious as Alaska. He brought with him from New York a crock of mustard, a jeroboam of champagne, cocktail napkins with a picture of a plane flying over a building on them, twenty egret feathers (“You cannot get them anymore — strictly illegal,” Tucker whispered to me), and, under his black cowboy hat with the rhinestone-studded chin strap, a toy frog that hopped when wound. Tucker owns a gallery in SoHo, and Frank keeps his books. Tucker is now stretched out in the living room, visiting with Frank, and Freddy and I are both listening.
“… so everything I’ve been told indicates that he lives a purely Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. He’s twenty years old, and I can see that since he’s still living at home he might not want to flaunt his gayness. When he came into the gallery, he had his hair slicked back — just with water, I got close enough to sniff — and his mother was all but holding his hand. So fresh-scrubbed. The stories I’d heard. Anyway, when I called, his father started looking for the number where he could be reached on the Vineyard — very irritated, because I didn’t know James, and if I’d just phoned James I could have found him in a flash. He’s talking to himself, looking for the number, and I say, ‘Oh, did he go to visit friends or—’ and his father interrupts and says, ‘He was going to a gay pig roast. He’s been gone since Monday.’ Just like that.”
Freddy helps me carry the food out to the table. When we are all at the table, I mention the young artist Tucker was talking about. “Frank says his paintings are really incredible,” I say to Tucker.
“Makes Estes look like an Abstract Expressionist,” Tucker says. “I want that boy. I really want that boy.”
“You’ll get him,” Frank says. “You get everybody you go after.”
Tucker cuts a small piece of meat. He cuts it small so that he can talk while chewing. “Do I?” he says.
Freddy is smoking at the table, gazing dazedly at the moon centered in the window. “After dinner,” he says, putting the back of his hand against his forehead when he sees that I am looking at him, “we must all go to the lighthouse.”
“If only you painted,” Tucker says. “I’d want you.”
“You couldn’t have me,” Freddy snaps. He reconsiders. “That sounded halfhearted, didn’t it? Anybody who wants me can have me. This is the only place I can be on Saturday night where somebody isn’t hustling me.”
“Wear looser pants,” Frank says to Freddy.
“This is so much better than some bar that stinks of cigarette smoke and leather. Why do I do it?” Freddy says. “Seriously — do you think I’ll ever stop?”
“Let’s not be serious,” Tucker says.
“I keep thinking of this table as a big boat, with dishes and glasses rocking on it,” Freddy says.
He takes the bone from his plate and walks out to the kitchen, dripping sauce on the floor. He walks as though he’s on the deck of a wave-tossed ship. “Mr. Sam!” he calls, and the dog springs up from the living-room floor, where he had been sleeping; his toenails on the bare wood floor sound like a wheel spinning in gravel. “You don’t have to beg,” Freddy says. “Jesus, Sammy — I’m just giving it to you.”
“I hope there’s a bone involved,” Tucker says, rolling his eyes to Frank. He cuts another tiny piece of meat. “I hope your brother does understand why I couldn’t keep him on. He was good at what he did, but he also might say just anything to a customer. You have to believe me that if I hadn’t been extremely embarrassed more than once I never would have let him go.”
“He should have finished school,” Frank says, sopping up sauce on his bread. “He’ll knock around a while longer, then get tired of it and settle down to something.”
“You think I died out here?” Freddy calls. “You think I can’t hear you?”
“I’m not saying anything I wouldn’t say to your face,” Frank says.
“I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t say to your face,” Freddy says. “You’ve got a swell wife and kid and dog, and you’re a snob, and you take it all for granted.”
Frank puts down his fork, completely exasperated. He looks at me.
“He came to work once this stoned,” Tucker says. “Comprenez-vous?”
“You like me because you feel sorry for me,” Freddy says.
He is sitting on the concrete bench outdoors, in the area that’s a garden in the springtime. It is early April now — not quite spring. It’s very foggy out. It rained while we were eating, and now it has turned mild. I’m leaning against a tree, across from him, glad it’s so dark and misty that I can’t look down and see the damage the mud is doing to my boots.
“Who’s his girlfriend?” Freddy says.
“If I told you her name, you’d tell him I told you.”
“Slow down. What?”
“I won’t tell you, because you’ll tell him that I know.”
“He knows you know.”
“I don’t think so.”
“How did you find out?”
“He talked about her. I kept hearing her name for months, and then we went to a party at Garner’s, and she was there, and when I said something about her later he said, ‘Natalie who?’ It was much too obvious. It gave the whole thing away.”
He sighs. “I just did something very optimistic,” he says. “I came out here with Mr. Sam and he dug up a rock and I put the avocado seed in the hole and packed dirt on top of it. Don’t say it — I know: can’t grow outside, we’ll still have another snow, even if it grew, the next year’s frost would kill it.”
“He’s embarrassed,” I say. “When he’s home, he avoids me. But it’s rotten to avoid Mark, too. Six years old, and he calls up his friend Neal to hint that he wants to go over there. He doesn’t do that when we’re here alone.”
Freddy picks up a stick and pokes around in the mud with it. “I’ll bet Tucker’s after that painter personally, not because he’s the hottest thing since pancakes. That expression of his — it’s always the same. Maybe Nixon really loved his mother, but with that expression who could believe him? It’s a curse to have a face that won’t express what you mean.”
“Amy!” Tucker calls. “Telephone.”
Freddy waves goodbye to me with the muddy stick. “ ‘I am not a crook,’ ” Freddy says. “Jesus Christ.”
Sam bounds halfway toward the house with me, then turns and goes back to Freddy.
It’s Marilyn, Neal’s mother, on the phone.
“Hi,” Marilyn says. “He’s afraid to spend the night.”
“Oh, no,” I say. “He said he wouldn’t be.”
She lowers her voice. “We can try it out, but I think he’ll start crying.”
“I’ll come get him.”
“I can bring him home. You’re having a dinner party, aren’t you?”
I lower my voice. “Some party. Tucker’s here. J.D. never showed up.”
“Well,” she says. “I’m sure that what you cooked was good.”