McWhirter by the scruff of the neck and instructed him to "get your faggot ass outta my way," but I rapidly separated the two, and Greco placated the cowboy with a rum and coke and gamely attempted to recruit him. The cowboy suddenly recognized McWhirter and Greco from the TV news, and Greco's pitch did seem to set some wheels spinning in his mind, but he said his parish priest wouldn't like it and he didn't sign up.
At the Green Room, McWhirter worked the backroom disco while Greco made his way into the smog of beer breath and smoke of the front-room piano bar. I tagged along with Greco into the crowd of alcoholic fifties queens up front, even though the room had always made me uncomfortable. The problem was, I always left with the nagging feeling that I belonged there.
The yellow-haired cowboy from the watering Hole came in just after Greco and I did. He peered around, seemed to decide that he didn't belong there at all, and fled back into the night.
At the piano bar, Greco unexpectedly ran into his old lover of ten years earlier, Tad something-or-other. It seemed to be a night for that. Timmy was still nowhere to be seen.
Greco and Tad were startled to see each other. Their brief conversation was awkward. I didn't listen in, but, trained and inclined to be nosy, I took in what I could by glancing their way from time to time. Tad, who'd been alone at the bar and sullenly preoccupied with a snifter of something warm and murky, grew quickly hostile, and Greco, looking injured and confused, soon retreated.
"An unhappy reunion?" I said.
Greco shrugged, trying to look philosophical, but his dark eyes were bright with hurt.
"You can't go home again," I said, and looked around to see if Timmy had come in the door. He hadn't. "When it's over, it's over. Never apologize, never explain. Never look back, or something might be gaining on you. What are some of the other ones?"
Greco didn't laugh. "Tad asked me for the money back," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. My immediate assumption was that Tad, my age or older, had once "kept" Greco. "All he could talk about," Greco said glumly, "was his lousy three thousand dollars. Of our whole year together, that's the only thing he remembers. God."
"Tad's quite a bookkeeper," I said.
"He never called it a loan then. That's so unfair. It really is. 'Where am I going to get three thousand dollars?' I said. He just said, 'You get it! Before you leave Albany!' It's the only thing he'd talk about. And how his business folded last year and how broke he is these days. Well, jeez.
I'm sorry things aren't going well for Tad, I really am. He deserves better. He was always extremely possessive, but he was also loving, and generous-"
Greco began suddenly to cough and gasp, and said the foul air was bothering him, so we walked out into the oppressive but smokeless night and stood alongside my car.
I said, "Tad took you in when you first came out?"
"Oh, no," Greco said, laughing lightly and breathing more easily now. "It was nothing like that.
I'd been out since I was fourteen and on my own since I was eighteen. Tad was ten years ago. I was twenty-four then and I'd already had several lovers. Tad must have been the-I don't know — fifteenth or twentieth."
Persons of the New Age. When I was twenty-four I was getting my kicks trying to decipher whether or not Ishmael might actually be getting it on with Queequeg.
"I didn't really settle down," Greco went on blithely, "until the year after that when I met Fenton and realized what I wanted to do with my life and who I wanted to do it with. No, the thing with Tad was… he was in love with me, and he paid to have my first volume of poems printed. I was reluctant. I knew I wasn't as crazy about Tad as he was about me. But I was too excited about 27 seeing my work in print to think straight, and I let him do it. I know it cost him a lot of money, but-God, how can somebody be that bitter after ten years?"
"Right. You'd think in all that time a person's feelings about someone would have gone through a lot of changes. Gotten milder, mellower." I watched for Timmy's yellow Chevette to pull in off Central.
"Oh, jeez, it's time," Greco said, glancing at his watch. "I've gotta get back to the house by midnight and stay with Dot and Edith so their friend can go home. Are you coming out for a while?"
I looked at him, wondering if the invitation was significant in a particular way. Being a not unattentive fellow- fifteen or twenty lovers by age twenty-four-he saw my interest.
"We could go out for a swim in the pond and lie down together under the stars," was what I first thought I heard him say, but what Greco actually said was "We could run off some more leaflets and wait for Fenton to get home. The mimeo machine's in the trunk of the car."
Ethics. Had I had them once? Could I again?
I said, "No, thanks. Timmy-my lover-is probably looking for me, so I guess I'll hang around here. I'll be at home later, so call if there's any problem out at Dot's. Otherwise, I'll be out there first thing in the morning."
"I'm glad you're helping us," he said, smiling. "Even if you're on the payroll of the Great Satan."
His eyes shone with their sweet humor, and I wanted again badly to touch him.
"Better not let the Ayatollah Fenton hear you say that," I said. "He still has this crazy idea that just because I'm a minion of Moloch I'm somehow not to be trusted."
"Trust is something you have to earn with Fenton," Greco said. "But once you've got it, you've got it for keeps."
He grinned again, looking as though he were trying to tell me something useful, and wondering if I'd caught on. Then he brushed my cheek with his hand again, the exasperating little shit, and we both went back inside the bar so that he could find McWhirter and get the car keys.
A few minutes later, I watched Greco head back out to the parking lot, and I rejoined McWhirter and the leafleters. They had signed up two men for the GNS at the Green Room, bringing the grand total for the bar tour to six.
By three-fifteen Timmy still had not shown up. By three-thirty I had befriended, in a narrow but specific way, a slender youngish man named Gordon whose black hair was as curly as Greco's, and whose eyes were as dark, though a good bit dimmer, as was the area behind them. At three-forty we pulled into the deserted parking lot of a Washington Avenue institution of higher learning. At three-fifty-one we pulled out again. He asked if I'd mind dropping him off at the Watering Hole, which wouldn't close for another nine minutes, and I did.
"Catch ya later, Ron," he said.
"For sure, Gordon, for sure."
Then I drove home.
The shower wasn't necessary except for purposes of general sanitation and cooling off. I wouldn't even have had to brush my teeth. Or wash both hands. But still I stayed under the cool-tepid spray for a good, cleansing fifteen minutes.
I settled into an easy chair and lit an imaginary cigarette. I wanted a real one and thought about driving over to Price Chopper to pick up a pack; it had been more than four years since I'd been off the killer weed, but what the hell. No, I'd smoke a joint instead, just something to feel the soothing harshness on my throat.
I rummaged around in the freezer, but all the little foil-wrapped packages I opened contained chicken necks. Timmy, the world's only Irish anal-retentive, saving up for a chicken-neck party or some goddamn thing.
A car pulled into the parking lot down below. Zip, back to the easy chair. I opened Swann's Way and sat there frowning toward it, as if I had been absorbed in the book since the second Eisenhower administration, which, intermittently, I had.
His footfall in the corridor. His hair would be mussed, his shirttail out. Cum on his eyebrow.
Anal hickeys.
His key in the lock.
"So, there you are, you elusive devil!" He laid his jacket on the couch and bent to kiss me. "I've been all up and down the avenue since ten-thirty. Everywhere I went I just missed you. You must have left the Green Room about a minute before I got there. Sorry about the screw-up, but my damn radiator sprung a leak. Seems half the cars in Albany overheated today, so I ended up with a rental car for the weekend. How'd it go tonight?"