Page 68 - WTP Vol. VIII #4

Plus One (continued from preceding page) ethereal barrier.
After the amazing espetada had been served, the sub- ject turned to Broadway musicals which Monica and Marcy and a few of the other women dearly loved. Kent said Monica played the music too often and he couldn’t stand it anymore. When he said this, she glanced off at the classical birdbath on the lawn and adopted a neutral expression, but he didn’t take the hint. “God save us from Cole Porter and George Ger- shwin and Oscar Hammerstein,” he went on. “If you’re male, you probably have to be queer to like that stuff.”
This was a liberal crowd and their opposition to such a statement was palpable but no one wanted an open conflict. Carmen asked if anyone wanted more pasta as a diversion. Yet Judd must have felt that he wasn’t participating, that old feeling of being an outsider peering in. He didn’t want to be a mere witness, a ghost at the table, and the statement seemed so ris- ible, he couldn’t bring himself to let it go.
“Why shouldn’t straight men like it? Guys and Dolls, Phantom of the Opera, Into the Woods. Those were great shows,” Judd said, though he had probably been to only four or five musicals in his life and preferred independent movies. He was just trying to get at why these productions were inherently unmasculine, why they should exclusively be the province of women. It seemed a kind of urban myth that only the LBGT set was drawn to certain professions—hairdressing, ice skating, interior decoration, the theater.
“I’m sorry. Are you gay?” Kent said without missing a beat, as if this were a matter of fact inquiry. Some- thing about the way he rubbed the fingers of one hand was like rolling a cigar.
“No, I’m just trying to make a point...”
“Are you sure?” he continued, cutting him off, slugging down a couple inches of his glass and then settling back with his wide, malevolent grin.
“Not the last time I checked,” Judd deadpanned, in an equable tone that brought a few modest laughs. Roger or Pete Blanchard, with whom Judd had roomed junior year might have come to his rescue but they must have been nonplussed or unsure how to disarm the minefield. Judd understood their predicament. How were they to intercede without disrupting the delicately calibrated mood of the whole meal? After the eternity of a pause filled only with the sound of silverware striking stone plates, Noel took over, in
his ingratiating way, mentioning his tour of Holland’s windmills, on a layover in Amsterdam.
For a while, Kent seemed to recede into a distant, almost sullen presence and Noel’s anecdotes about the atmosphere of Barcelona or Calais again re- sumed center stage. Then they eased into the silly old saws, the ones for which they had nicknamed themselves “The Anarchists of Fenrow Hall.” One of the sophomoric stunts was the “Chinese firedrill.”
At a stoplight, a car full of them would all jump out and run around clockwise, shaking their hands in the air and screaming, before re-entering in their same positions. There was Pete somehow wedged in a
tiny depression era bathtub and too drunk to extract himself. Next there was the “exploding snow” where shaving cream was dispensed into a large envelope with the open side placed stealthily under a rival’s door, then stomped, blasting the stuff all over the room. Carmen mentioned they’d recently gotten a postcard from Jack Hurley and almost in unison the rest of them shouted “bed of nails!” Somehow Judd had never heard this, how a smashed Jack disdained the floor and was forced to sleep on a box spring, such that the coils were imprinted all over him the next morning like a deadly virus.
The tales were shopworn but still managed to stir some ineffable, buoyant feeling of what it was like
to be young, with all the possibilities of the world spread out before you. The fact that Judd wasn’t around for many of the episodes, that there were some gaps in their shared experience, some referenc- es missed, didn’t seem to detract from the mythical glory of those days. College had been a difficult time of juggling books and alliances, on a path toward finding his place in the world. He was a bit more conservative and buttoned down than they were. The anarchists often liked different music, kidding him about his old Miles Davis and Mel Torme tunes. Yet they remained tolerant of his iconoclasm which at times verged on misanthropy.
When the laughter subsided, Roger asked Marcy if her sister Sonia was staying at their cottage for the summer, and something akin to an electric shock tra- versed the length of Judd’s neck. He could even feel
a blush beginning to take hold, a sensation he hadn’t had for decades. Certain memories were always being suppressed, shoved into the dusty cellar but not expunged entirely, and the one involving Sonia surged out like a long imprisoned genie.
She had come to campus one weekend to visit and after a few tantalizing exchanges, he fell for her— those flashing hazel eyes, wavy jet black hair and sleek frame―like an anvil off a cliff. But there seemed to be some unspoken rule that none of the anarchists
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