On the Other Hand, Death

He turned in the bedroom doorway to face me. I said, "How did your evening go, anyway? With Boyd-boy. You neglected mentioning that."
"Oh, shit," he said, shaking his head and looking wearily amused by it all. "Boyd is such a flake. I'll tell you all about it in a minute. Just hold on. Boy, do I stink!"
No doubt. He sped into the bathroom to, I assumed, scrub down his eyebrow.
I read in Swann's Way the words "But, whereas" several times, then reinserted the yellowing bookmark. I waited. When I heard the water stop running, I opened the book and reread, "But, whereas."
"But, whereas."
"But, whereas."
"But, whereas."
Timmy came back, theatrically erect. Quite the athlete, Timmy.
"I love your ass, Donald Strachey," he said in a low voice, and dove at me with the concentrated enthusiasm he generally reserved for a misplaced article of clothing.
I said, "Did you and Boyd-boy do it? You know—'it'?
The famous and ever-popular but-still-controversial-in-some-circles 'it'?"
He halted in midair, hung there briefly, then descended to his dumb, ugly puce shag rug I'd never liked.
In a tight little voice, he said, "No. We did not. Boyd and I did not do . . . 'it.'"
He stood there hot-eyed, waiting, his mind working, not so extravagantly prepossessing below the waist now, but staring hard at me, as if he had just been fucked—in the metaphorical sense this time. A well-rounded evening for Timmy.
I said, "Just thought I'd ask. When you came in you had some kind of goddamn dried white flaky stuff on your eyebrow."
"On my eyebrow. On my eyebrow. Ooops," he said, looking mock-guilty and clamping a hand over one eye. Then the anger surged through him and he spat it at me: "Ooops! Ooops, ooops, ooops."
His face was an inch from mine. I turned away. He was sweating, breathing hard, eyes like blue and white saucers.
He said, "Look at me."
I said nothing.
He said, "One of us doesn't trust one of us."
I could feel myself flushing.
He said, "You are the one who doesn't trust one of us.
I knew what was coming.
He said, "You don't trust the one of us who picked up a SUNY student in Price Chopper in June and was seen doing it by Phil Hopkins." Hopkins, that insufferable busybody. "Which aisle was it, lover? I want to know. I want to find out which are the cruisy aisles at Price Chopper in case I ever start doing again what the mistrustful one of us does now. Which aisle is the hot one? Is it fresh
produce? Oral dentifrices? Day-old baked goods?"
I looked into his face now. I opened my mouth to
speak, then closed it. Then I opened it again and croaked
out, "The meat department, naturally. In fact—poultry." He tried not to laugh. I tried not to laugh. We
laughed.
We lay together on the comfy puce shag rug and shared a joint. Ever the cautious bureaucrat, he'd hidden it in a pint of Haagen-Dazs boysenberry with a false bottom. We ate the Haagen-Dazs too.
"I apologize," I said.
"Mmm."
"It was me I didn't trust. I knew that. Sort of."
"Uh-huh. So, how many have there been? Since June?"
"I thought you never wanted to know the sordid details."
"A number is not sordid."
That's all he knew. "Since June? Oh . . . about three."
"Approximately three."
"More or less."
"Uh-huh. More or less."
I said, "Seven."
He sighed, very deeply. "Look, Don," he said. "I don't like it. You know I don't like it. Maybe I shouldn't care. But I care. I'm not a man of the brave new world. You know that. I'm just me, Timothy J. Callahan, an aging kid from St. Mary's parish, Poughkeepsie, and I care.
"But I also know that if you're going to do it, you're going to do it. And apparently you are going to do it. You told me that a long time ago. However," he said, leaning up and looking sadly into my face, "if you're going to do it—and I'm not giving you permission, because you're not a child and I'm not your parent, so I'm not in a position to
either give or withhold permission, and as a free adult you're not in a position to ask for it. But, if you are going to do it once in a while, I want to ask two things of you, okay?"
"Ask away."
"One: Don't get herpes or AIDS."
"I promise."
He sighed again. "And, two"—he looked at me wistfully now, with just a lingering trace of bitter resentment—"don't assume, Don, that I'm doing it too."
I said nothing. I couldn't. I knew that it would be so much better for both of us if I changed. And that I wouldn't.
Finally I said, "Gotcha."
"So," he said, going through the motions of relaxing again. "Don't you want to hear about my drink with Boyd?"
"Sure. What was it like?"
"Glorious," he said, grinning. "We went up to his room at the Hilton and fucked the bejesus out of each other."
I slowly turned and studied his face with great care.
"Oh," he said, shrugging. "It didn't mean anything, Don. Hell, it was just for old times' sake. That was all. I mean, it had nothing to do with us."
He couldn't keep a straight face for long—he never could—and when he began to laugh I grabbed him. He'd been ribbing me, the mischievous rascal, I was 93 percent certain.
We were just getting going again, and then, too exhausted to do it, to fall asleep together instead—when the telephone rang.
I groped onto the end table and snatched down the receiver. "This is Strachey."
"Is Peter with you?"
"Peter? No. Is this . . . Fenton?"
"Peter's not here. He didn't come home. Where is he?"
"He left the Green Room before midnight, didn't he? In your car. I saw you give him the keys."
"But he's not here!"  McWhirter whined, a clear note of fright in his voice. "The cars not here."
"Don't go anywhere. Don't leave Dot and Edith. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
We dressed. As we headed out Central Avenue in my car, I brought Timmy up to date on the day's events at Dot Fisher's. He didn't react much, but he didn't like the sound of any of it.
We pulled into the parking lot at the Green Room. The place was quiet, deserted. One car sat in the far corner of the tarmac lot, McWhirter's old green Fiat. We got out and examined it. The windows were rolled up and the car was empty and locked. The keys were not in the ignition.
As we sped on out Central, dawn broke in a cloudless sky.
6. When Ned Bowman arrived at nine-fifteen
I was still on the phone. I had spent nearly an hour rudely awakening people I remembered seeing at the Green Room the night before, describing Greco and asking if anyone had seen him leave the place, in a car, on foot, alone, accompanied. No one had, though none of the twenty or so men I spoke with was entirely alert and in command of his full faculties at the hour I called.
Detective Lieutenant Ned Bowman, decked out in his
customary uniform of white socks, dark sport coat, and clip-on brown tie, greeted Dot formally, exchanged scowls with McWhirter, suffered through an introduction to Timmy—homosexuals not wearing pleated skirts always confused Bowman—then came over to where I stood by the wall phone and whispered, "Hi, faggot."