That evening, at dinner, just before dessert, Terry said, “Billy says you’ve been a bad boy — ” and broke out laughing.
“Now why you gonna go tell him I told you about that for?” Billy demanded.
“That’s all right,” Terry said. “I just couldn’t help it. I know, these things happen. Did you get it taken care of?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I did.”
“That’s why he’s sitting so gingerly on his right cheek, I bet,” Billy said — though the soreness from the shot had already gone.
The next day, however, I’d developed a summer cough. I kept on with the oral penicillin that had been prescribed for me — and worked into the evening. Once Terry knocked on my door, and I told her I probably wouldn’t be up for the next few dinners, as I wanted to work through the nights.
“Suit yourself,” she said. “But we always like to have you.”
“Thanks,” I told her. “But I want to clean the place up a little, too. Marilyn’ll be back at the end of the week.”
Over the next two days the cold got a lot worse.
I disappeared into my apartment for four days.
19.8. Marilyn got home, with her suitcase, and found me in bed. The trip had had its rough spots, but basically she’d enjoyed it. She’d gone traveling about the country with two Mexican friends. And she’d written three poems. One was a lovely and sinuous sestina she’d composed on the occasion of purchasing, somewhere in Mexico City, a beautiful alexandrite pendant, the yellow stone looped in gold at the end of its chain, to give to her mother as a birthday present. And there were two other six-line-long character portraits (“The tow-and-aster Texans drawl, scuff, slur / the condescension of conquistadors …”[19] and, “Senora P[edrosal]”[20]) that might, she thought back then, become part of something longer.
Three poems in six weeks? In the previous six months she had fully completed only two.
She sat on the bed’s edge and read the new ones to me, showed me the pendant in its white box — and I was as pleased as she was. “But what’s wrong with you?” she finally got around to asking.
“Just a summer cold,” I told her. “I feel terrible, but I love the poems! I’ll be all right.”
“Well,” she said, peering at me, “you don’t look very good.”
We had a thermometer in the bathroom, and Marilyn decided to take my temperature: it was a hundred three.
A couple of hours later, she loaded me into a cab and took me up to Bellevue, where I was X-rayed, diagnosed as having pneumonia, admitted, and hooked up to an IV.
The fever hit a hundred four that night before it broke.
I stayed at Bellevue a few days, then was transferred to Sydenham for two weeks — where I could look out my window down at the ANGELLETTER wall. My mother and aunts and sister came to see me. I think even Hilda came by. Two weeks later I was out and back at East Fifth Street.
19.81. Claud had called to invite Marilyn and me over for brunch. But that morning Marilyn was feeling tired and on the verge of a cold, and so excused herself.
When I came into Claud’s small, top floor Village apartment, he had a large kettle for hardboiled eggs on the stove. “If you put a little vinegar in,” he explained, “then, when you peel them, they come out smooth and the whites don’t stick to the shells.”
“What — ” I was curious — “are we having for brunch that requires three dozen hardboiled eggs?”
“Oh, no — those aren’t for us.” It seemed that Claud had gotten a part-time job with a catering company. He had to boil and peel the eggs for them.
So I washed my hands. Claud cooled the eggs under cold water at the sink; and for the beginning of the morning, we sat at the kitchen table together, while he showed me the proper way to peel one — by making a small crack, rolling the egg on a hard surface so that the shell shattered over the whole of it, then slipping it off with a motion or two, the white fragments clinging to the inner membrane.
“We’re having scrambled eggs,” Claud said, when we were finished. He put away the glass bowl of glistening white ovoids with here and there the faintest green showing. “I always think scrambled eggs come out better if you cook them in a double boiler — do you mind if I put in a dash of Worcestershire Sauce? It adds something I’ve always enjoyed — but it may not be you.”
“Sure,” I said. “Go ahead.”
Claud got out his white enameled double boiler and returned to the stove. “I’m just so sorry Marilyn didn’t come with you. …”
I’ve often pondered on the terms “gay culture,” “gay society,” “gay sensibility.” The hard-headed Marxist in me knows that we must be talking about behavior, mediated through psychology, that responds to a whole set of social and economic forces that it would have been as easy to locate under Claud’s life as under mine. But at the intuitive level (i.e., that level wholly culture bound), where we feel as if, somehow, there is such a thing as a culture apart from infrastructural realities, gay society has always seemed to me an accretion of dozens on dozens of such minutiae, a whole rhetoric of behavior — how to twist the skin off a clove of garlic, how to open the doors to the unsold box seats at Carnegie Hall with a dime, the shifting, protean, and liquid knowledge of where sex is to be found in the city, this season, or Worcestershire Sauce in your eggs — that together make up a life texture I was at once almost wholly appreciative of, and at the same time felt almost wholly estranged from: as if it were a myth that I could never quite reach.
But perhaps (though today I still like Worcestershire Sauce in my eggs) any “identity”—semantic, generic, personal, or cultural — is always such an accretive, associative, but finally disjunctive illusion.
19.82. I was curious how Marilyn would take to Sonny. I’d told him about her; her about him. I wasn’t interested in continuing the sexual side of our relationship. (Did Sonny bite his nails? No. Often he let them grow to none too clean and almost womanly length.) Marilyn was not the most outgoing and trusting of nineteen-year-olds, and I did not see her having much tolerance for a thirty-year-old overweight grifter and thug. Several times I had seen Sonny’s good-natured gruffness become outright cruelty, and I was ready, with Marilyn’s return, to end the friendship altogether, which had been winding down anyway. But perhaps because of his twelve sisters, or perhaps because Marilyn was simply too young to be of sexual interest to him (“I like good-lookin’ young guys and sweet-smellin’ old ladies. Anything else I gotta fuck is work!”), just after I got out of the hospital Sonny came knocking at the door of our dead-end Fifth Street apartment; and Marilyn seemed to draw out of him all sorts of attempts at acting civilized, which, however they misfired, absolutely tickled her. He showered her with attention in a perfectly nonthreatening way.
I suspect she saw him as a cross between a teddy bear and an underclass Prince Charming. (Once he even came to bring her some rather dilapidated flowers.) Sonny soon became one of her favorites among my friends. The only strain on the relationship was once, when we ran into him in the street, he introduced Marilyn to one of his crazed, aged women friends, half bent over with arthritis — who, I suspect, was slightly schizophrenic and who began to finger Marilyn’s clothing and talk a stream of incomprehensible babble. All the uneasiness and barely masked distaste that I’d thought would have greeted Sonny came out now — though the woman’s response seemed only that she now decided, in her incoherent way, Marilyn must need infinite care, concern, and protection, which, I’m afraid, made Marilyn more confused and uncomfortable. Sonny took it all in stride, though.