Hello, Young Lovers
Andrew Holleran
There were several ways, the winter of 1981, to get from New York to the Hotel San Martin. The easiest was to take a night flight to San Juan and wait for a flight the next morning to the other, much smaller, island on which the hotel was located. People who didn’t want to hang around the airport sometimes took a taxi into Old San Juan to wander around the streets looking at courtyards and churches till the sun came up. Others stayed in the airport and tried to sleep in those plastic chairs. Which one they chose often depended on their condition—since many people were sick when they left New York in January. Life in Manhattan seems to climax at New Year’s in a way that leaves you run-down afterward, so that you almost always have the flu, or at least a bad cold. Coughing, sneezing, hacking, wheezing, guests would straggle up the drive to the Hotel San Martin as if they were checking into the hospital. Sometimes the only way you can ditch a cold is to just get out of town.
The Hotel San Martin was a perfect place to recuperate because there was nothing to do there—no activities, or nightlife. It was best to go with a friend who liked to read, or a couple who wanted to concentrate on each other. Dennis and Kent had been together only a few months the year I went down with them. They had met at a posh party they were both bartending. Dennis was an actor from San Francisco who had just decided to quit the theater, Kent was an Oxford graduate who’d come to New York fifteen years ago to take a year off and never left; and this was their honeymoon. In fact, I was asked along as their photographer. My assignment was very specific. “What I don’t want,” Dennis said, “is an artsy close-up of tiles—you know, the travel magazine thing. No shadows on the louvered doors! Nothing stark! I want a postcard picture, the most obvious, clichéd view you can find—except there has to be someone in it. Me! I want spectacular views with me and my darling in the foreground. No lizards on a balustrade, no tiles! Just the honeymoon couple with a drop-dead view! I like to see where the people are. I have never understood how a picture of a tile shows you what an island looks like. I mean, what on earth is the point of a picture of a tile when you want to see the place?”
“The point is, my darling,” said Kent, “the tile is a synecdoche.”
“And what is a synecdoche?”
“A synecdoche is a part that stands for the whole. The tile stands in for the entire island—it supplies a detail that lets you imagine the rest.”
“But I don’t want to imagine. I want to just lie in the sun. Oh, darling,” said Dennis, holding his arms out. “You’re not just English. You’re not just Oxford. You’re the Oxford English Dictionary!”
He was; or something close. Kent seemed glad, in fact, when I told him the island we were going to was an extremely quiet place: he said that was just what he wanted. He had packed a long biography of Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy. He liked the fact that Old San Juan was empty when we took a cab there rather around 3:00 A.M. Then, while standing outside a church, we looked up to see four men coming down the cobblestones in white pants, Hawaiian shirts, and gold jewelry, who were obviously barhopping. Dennis stared. “That’s just what we want to avoid,” Dennis said as the quartet walked toward us. The minute they left, for a bar in the Condado, we decided to hail a cab, too, and not wait till morning for the flight. Instead we took a taxi to the publico to Fajardo, a few hours’ drive from San Juan, to get the boat.
The publico to Fajardo was an old Volkswagen van filled with American sailors who were all drunk, and all talking about the women they’d just had in San Juan, including the one who was still on the fingers the sailor beside Dennis held to his nose the entire journey. “Oh, darling,” Dennis hissed in my ear. “I’ll never have sex again.” The minute we reached the island, however, the sailors disappeared in every available taxi to the American base that still occupied almost half the island in 1981, and we began to walk to the hotel in the brightening dawn. The only creatures up were the roosters: that sound that lets you know immediately you’re in the Caribbean. “Is that a synecdoche?” said Dennis. “Does the rooster stand for the entire island?” “Yes, yes,” said Kent happily. Even for the Caribbean, this island was particularly rural. This island’s claim to fame was a movie that had been made here ten years before about a group of English schoolboys who revert to savages after they are shipwrecked. Walking to the hotel, past jacaranda trees in bloom, and horses grazing and cows with egrets on their backs, we felt ourselves reverting, in the soft tropical air, not to English bullies, but to children who just wanted to be put to bed. In our rooms at the hotel there was only one decision to make—to lie down under the ceiling fans, or on a chaise longue by the pool. But there really was no choice. Lying down under the ceiling fans was the equivalent of anesthesia—you were asleep before you knew it.
On awakening there was the most wonderful feeling at the Hotel San Martin: the certainty that you’d made the right choice—the journey had been worth it. There are certain places in life whose pleasures are so unadvertised that the mere appearance of another person like yourself creates a bond. That hotel was one. In 1981 no travel writer, with or without a photograph of tiles, or a hibiscus and a toothbrush in a glass of water, had exploited it. It had never been mentioned in the New York Times. It wasn’t even on the list of the people who sniff out the next new thing (gay men preferred San Juan), so one was surprised, in a sense, to see anyone else at the Hotel San Martin.
Of course, there were Other People at the Hotel San Martin—it was a hotel—but the unspoken feeling of camaraderie at having found the place made you give them the benefit of the doubt. And that was all that was required. In fact, people there hardly spoke to one another. The atmosphere was one of trust. Guests left their doors open to get the breeze, so that, returning to your room, you would often find the very image Dennis had forbidden: a green lizard perched on a suitcase, or a frog in your shoe, or a butterfly looping across the balcony. There was no firm line of demarcation between the interior and exterior; the hotel was built around a courtyard planted with a giant ficus tree. Inside was the slightly rank odor of decaying vegetable matter, luminous shadows, echoing voices, the slap of sandals on the tiled floor, the gleam of dark wood, birdsong, and leaves: the romance of the New World. Outside, beyond the veranda that ran along the rooms, a glimpse of silver sea, tossing palms, and a woman in a blue nightgown, cutting flowers in her backyard across a dried streambed. In the rear of the hotel was a tiled terrace. Beyond it was an ancient swimming pool, its paint peeling off, and, past that, an old white horse, grazing in a field of high grass.
The horse was in not much better shape than the hotel. The swimming pool hiccuped—at least that was what the noise it emitted sounded like; unless it was the noise the diver in an iron helmet makes in an old movie where you see his breath rising to the surface in big bubbles. Glug, glug, glug, went the swimming pool—decomposing, like everything at the hotel. There was no concierge. No chambermaid kept your room in order. The swimming pool needed a coat of white paint. The wicker chairs on the veranda were so frayed they were coming apart. The big broad beds in the rooms you passed were made level only with magazines placed under their uneven legs. Their tangled sheets, strewn with the detritus of bathing suits, tank tops, tubes of suntan lotion, and bottles of moisturizer, spoke of one fact: this was a place people came to collapse. The retired manufacturer from Boston who had just bought the place sat at a small desk in the hallway going over accounts with a pen and pencil. No one made the beds. Even the flowers people picked—star of Venezuela, gardenia, and hibiscus—they forgot to put in water, because in the tropics, after one day, you cease to understand with the clarity one has up north why anything has to be done immediately.
Indeed, the prevailing mood at the Hotel San Martin was a vast lethargy. Few guests at the hotel exhibited the energy necessary to do much of anything. Sometimes somebody walked into town, or hired a taxi to the remote beaches one could not get to on foot. It was too much trouble to go to the best beaches on the navy base, because that required passing through a checkpoint, which required removing pieces of identification from a wallet. Most people just decomposed. Guests spoke to one another only at breakfast—and that consisted primarily of trading travel tips. Come dinnertime, they were so exhausted by the sun and sea, they sat like zombies, staring into the flames of the candles that floated in oil in seashells on each table. The terrace at that hour had an almost religious atmosphere, as if we were all waiting for a service to begin. In fact, we were starving. There was a little bar beneath the owner’s desk, but nothing like a cocktail hour. Dinner was at seven—and that was that. While waiting for our food the guests watched Dulcinea flick her tail in the gloom beyond the pool. After dinner everyone went to bed, for there was nothing else to do.
The second night we did summon up the energy to take a walk after dinner to the village at the bottom of the hill, but no one was doing anything there, either. The people in the village were all in their houses watching television underneath a naked lightbulb suspended from the ceiling. The only exception was a slender young man in a phone booth at the edge of a cracked cement basketball court, talking to someone, I imagined, on the mainland, oblivious to the vast, magnificent, darkening clouds above the ocean at his back. Here we are, I thought, come all this way to see something he saw every day of his life and could not be bothered to look at. “I’ve never been so tired in my life,” said Dennis after we fled a barking dog and went back up the hill. “Thank God there’s nothing to do at night.” And with that we parted in the corridor. The ceiling fans that kept mosquitoes away created a white noise so soporific their hum was the last thing you heard until the sound of a rooster the next day.
The first item of business after waking was to step onto the veranda, rub the sleep from your eyes, and stare at the hibiscus flowers beaded with drops of dew along the balustrade, and beyond them the housewife in a blue nightgown cutting flowers in her backyard, and beyond her the sea. Then one heard, with perfect clarity, the voices of the couple in the room next door. She: “You’re such a lecher!” He: “I can’t help it!” Then, like the cries of the roosters and goats, the dogs in the village below, came the familiar urgency of breath, the gasps and groans, as two larger mammals copulated before going to the beach, their only witnesses myself and the lizard perched on the balcony. Even sex seemed incongruous on those fresh tropical mornings. Even desire required too much effort. On a short walk before breakfast the second morning there was a crew digging a ditch for a water main along the road, and as I walked past, a young man with a smooth brown chest and large green eyes stood up from his shovel and smiled at me—but there was nothing to do but murmur “Buenos” and keep walking. One was in love with the island. When I passed the couple from Michigan on my return, emerging from their room with rosy faces and large designer eyeglasses, on their way to toast and scrambled eggs, I felt no more envious than I did when I knocked on the door of my two friends.
“Come in!” they cried, still tangled up in sheets when I entered, their torsos covered with strips of sunlight let in by the louvered door, exactly like the photograph Dennis forbade me to take. “How long have you been up? What’s happened?” said Kent in his plummy British accent. “Any scandals? Gossip? New arrivals?”
“No,” I replied. “Nothing’s happened—though there’s a gorgeous guy digging a ditch outside the hotel—if we hurry, we’ll pass him on our way to the beach.”
“That’s not what I want,” he said. “I’ve finished my biography of Mary of Teck and I have nothing to read. I need gossip!”
But there was none. The guests consisted of a couple from Cincinnati who had gone to St. Bart’s the previous winter; an Italian businessman looking for a lot on which to build a vacation home; a fabric designer from the West Village whose wife taught fencing to senior citizens in New Jersey; a composer from Brooklyn; and the copulating couple from Detroit. A plump, bearded man in his fifties completed the roster—a stage manager from Manhattan who spent most of the day lying by the pool on a chaise longue, wrapped in a leopard-skin-patterned cloth, coughing. That was it. A young woman named Peggy waited on tables while the owner—the shoe manufacturer who’d sold his factory to buy the hotel—sat at a table in the atrium with a morose expression doing paperwork.
The conversation at breakfast illustrated perfectly that peculiar phenomenon of travelers who talk about the places they have just been or are about to visit—everything but where they are. The woman from Brooklyn told us about a bicycle trip through Zambia she had just finished; the couple from Cincinnati talked about Barcelona; the fabric designer about Bali; the couple from Detroit Belize. This had one advantage: no intimacies were established—the common topic (travel) let everyone express himself while remaining completely unknown. This, however, was only a goad to Kent, who said, as we were leaving the hotel after breakfast, “I think we should get drunk tonight and stir things up—be rude to everyone. Let’s tell Irving his hotel is a dump, let’s tell Peggy the chicken Kiev tastes like lighter fluid, let’s tell the couple from Michigan they woke you up with their morning screw, and let’s ask the stage manager where he got that hideous caftan and the ridiculous jewelry. Let’s get stinko! Let’s get something started! It’s all too dull!”
“Divinely dull,” sighed Dennis as we headed toward a grove of sea grape trees sheltering the beach. “Divinely, deliciously, delectably dull. Just the way I wanted it!” he said, taking Kent’s arm.
They were still in that stage in which the simplest act—preparing to dress for the beach in their rooms, or spreading their towels out once we got to the lagoon—was freighted with affection. Moments after running into the ocean with hands held, they were wrapped so tightly in each other’s arms, their two heads looked from a distance like one coconut bobbing on the waves. After our swim, Dennis lay his head on Kent’s stomach while Kent read aloud a story about Dolly Parton in the Enquirer and Dennis stared into space, silenced by one of those moments when at last life is perfect.
“You know,” said Dennis, when Kent went back in the water, “I’m afraid my darling drinks a teensy bit too much, and I suspect his mother will never let him bring me back to the stately home—there really is one, dear, it’s called Cranston Hall—but you must admit he’s awfully handsome. Don’t you think?” He looked over at me, squinting in the sunlight: “I hope, by the way, you got a shot of us when we were coming out of the sea just now. You mustn’t forget the photographs. This is my honeymoon, and you know how much the scrapbooks mean to me! It’s all going in my scrapbooks. I want every magic moment registered! If you get my drift, dear.”
“I do,” I said. Indeed, I knew about those scrapbooks. They occupied three shelves in Dennis’s apartment on Tenth Street and seemed, at times, to be his reason for living—not whatever he experienced, but the photograph of it, mounted. I couldn’t decide if this was because Dennis knew more than most that life is fleeting, so he’d better record what he could, or because all that mattered to him was the visual representation of something, not the thing itself. At any rate, I was here to record his bliss in permanent chemicals, and moments later, when Kent ran out of the water and Dennis rose to greet him, I was already standing with camera in hand by the time they embraced as Dennis yelled to me, “Be sure there’s no seaweed in the shot! I want no seaweed! And wait for the sand in the water to settle! I want it clear! Like a glass of gin!”
Click. Later that afternoon while they snored, I got up to explore a path that led through the sea grape grove to a brackish swamp in whose shallow water pink crabs scuttled to hide at my approach, a path that brought me to the edge of a coral cliff, with a view of another, blazing beach I could not reach, then back through a grove of thorn trees, where I came upon a discarded turquoise bathing suit, more erotic than any person could have been. At dusk we walked home on the path that linked three beaches, the sky above us changing color, as I allowed my friends to walk ahead, arm in arm. In the gloom horses stood watching as we passed. A man was seated on the hood of his car at the main beach, staring out to sea, as if he wanted to be somewhere else.
We were quite happy to be where we were, however; everything was perfect, so that at first it seemed of little interest that evening that there were two new guests seated at the table in the corner of the terrace. Both looked like college students. One was remarkably handsome; the other had black, curly hair, braces on his teeth, and a T-shirt that said VILLANOVA. At first they made no impression. Then Kent leaned over the little candle floating between us and said, “Well? What do you think?”
“What, dear?” said Dennis.
“Are they?” said Kent.
“Are they what?” said Dennis.
“You know, that way.”
“Why, I don’t know,” said Dennis, as he munched on a bread stick. “It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder. But I am prepared to receive vibrations.” Then he fell silent while we consumed our soup, as still as a radar screen waiting for a blip to appear; Dennis was trying to receive vibrations, I realized; he prided himself on his ability to receive vibrations. “I think they’re straight,” he finally said. “Two friends, students, who decided to travel together.”
At this point the handsome one was looking around at the other guests; the other did not look up at all.
“I remember traveling at that age with a friend,” said Kent. “He was very shy. Terrified, in fact, that I might run off and leave him. It came to a head in a museum in Munich. I turned away from a painting of, what else, Saint Sebastian, and literally cut my cheek on the edge of his glasses—he had been standing an inch away from me, following me from painting to painting, like a child holding on to his mother’s skirt. I told him I wasn’t moving till he went off to look at paintings on his own. Travel frightens some people.” He sipped his consommé and said, “That’s what I think about them. One’s shy, the other isn’t.”
“Clinging to his friend?” said Dennis.
“Exactly,” said Kent.
“But this is not the sort of place college students come on vacation,” said Dennis. “It’s too out of the way. Maybe they are family. On the other hand, no homosexual wears braces on his teeth! Would a homosexual wear braces on his teeth?” he said to Peggy as she arrived with the paella.
“You got me,” she said.
“We’re wondering who the new guests are,” said Dennis.
“They’re from New Jersey,” she said. “Will you be having wine?”
Kent said, “Yes.” Dennis said, “No.”
“Oh, go ahead,” said the stage manager from New York, rising from his table next to ours. “Life’s a banquet and most poor fools are starving to death!” For a moment we thought he was going to join us, but instead he headed for the two young men, and began to sing, in a quavering contralto, a song from The King and I. “Hello, young lovers, whoever you are,” he sang as he walked right past them, “I hope you’re faithful and true. ...”
Dennis turned to us with his mouth agape. “That’s exactly what I don’t want to be like when I get old,” he said.
At that moment the two newcomers rose from their table.
“Good evening,” Kent said as they came near.
The handsome one stopped, while the boy with braces kept right on walking. We talked about beaches, we told him how to get to our favorite, he thanked us and said good night. The palms rustled. The pool hiccuped. The horse flicked its tail. Kent put his fork down and said: “I’m sure he’s not.”
“I think he’s dead gay!” said Dennis.
“You’re wrong,” said Kent. “He’s too relaxed!”
“Can’t homosexuals be relaxed?”
“No,” said Kent. “Not really. They live in a state of perpetual anxiety—for two very good reasons. One, they never know when they may be beaten up. Two, they worry that queens like us will come on to them. They live in a constant fear of predation. But the boy just now illustrated none of that. There was no fear—of punishment or sex. He was relaxed. A homosexual is never relaxed—because it’s not easy being a ponce.”
“It’s dead easy,” said Dennis.
“That may be true in your case, actually,” Kent said, looking at Dennis as if regarding him from a new, anthropological light. “I think you probably are one of the few people I have ever met who really don’t seem, on some level, bothered by it.”
“What’s to be bothered by?” said Dennis. “The queen got one thing right—life is a banquet, and most poor fools are starving to death! Those boys are deeply in love, and having the time of their young lives!”
It looked more as if they were sleeping when we came to our secret beach the next day and found that it was no longer that: the newcomers were lying on the sand near our usual spot as we emerged from the grove of sea grape trees. We stood there for a moment gazing at them. Then Dennis said: “I was wrong. They’re not gay.”
“And why do you say that?” said Kent.
“Because their towels aren’t touching. Lovers always lay their towels down so that they’re touching.”
The one thing we couldn’t do was ask; so instead, to advertise our presence, we ran into the ocean; and when we emerged from the water they were gone.
“You see? Not gay,” said Dennis as he walked back wiping the water from his eyes. “They didn’t want three old queens staring at them.”
“Is that what we are to them?” said Kent.
“Yes. Age is relative, you know. It’s like the beach in Mexico I went to,” said Dennis, getting out the cheese and crackers, “at their age. I was still in college, traveling with friends from school. We went to this island off the coast of Yucatán, which nobody went to then—and walked miles to get to this beach the locals had told us about. Walked and walked and walked. Climbed cliffs, coral cliffs, trudged and trudged till our feet were raw, and then, when we finally got to the most beautiful beach in the world, there, at the farthest end, were these two men lying in hammocks—who looked exactly alike! The same height, same body, same tan, same hair, same bathing suits, and reading the same book—a life of Betty Grable! We had come all the way to this tiny island off the coast of Mexico, walked barefoot over coral to get to this legendary beach, and what did we find? Two queens from West Hollywood! I wanted to have nothing to do with them. Now,” he said, handing us our crackers and cheese, “flash forward many years. Here we are on this beautiful beach. Only this time we sent them screaming. It’s the oldest story in the book! You fly in a jet, take a boat to an island that isn’t even on the map, hike for hours, finally reach the most beautiful beach in the world, and what do you find? Two decorators in white bikinis reading the life of Betty Grable.”
“But why would they think we’re queens?” I said.
“Why not?” said Dennis. “We’re not wearing six scarves and a quarter pound of jewelry from Fortunoff like that number singing Rodgers and Hammerstein last night, but we are three gents of a certain age together on a beach in the tropics. Which is why I’d love it if you took a photo of us right now,” he said, turning to me. “The light is so pretty, and we’re not plastered with seaweed.”
“Well,” said Kent, “this island is quite big enough for all of us, wouldn’t you say?”
And with that the sobering sensation of viewing ourselves through the eyes of others vanished, and we lay down and stared at the wedge of white sand between two coral cliffs whose beauty made us forget these petty, snobbish matters. An hour later the honeymooners began playing a game called Elevator, in which each one would dive down, push up off the sea bottom, and scream, as they burst up out of the water: “Lingerie!” or “Sixth floor, Menswear!” That evening we were so tired at dinner we were not even thinking about the newcomers until the handsome one said good evening as he passed our table and asked how our day had been.
“Wonderful,” said Dennis. “I hope we didn’t drive you off the beach.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “We wanted to check out some more places on the base. Really beautiful,” he said, and then with a nod and a smile he went to the table in the corner, where his companion was already boring a hole into the menu.
“I have a new theory,” said Kent. “The pretty one is not gay, but the other one, who won’t even look at us, is. Why else would he avoid us so strenuously? Only people who suspect homosexuality in themselves react adversely to other homos. The genuine heterosexual is indifferent. The one with the braces, however, seems extremely uncomfortable in our presence.”
“Very uncomfortable,” said Dennis.
“Self-conscious and ill at ease,” said Kent. “And depressed.” After a few more minutes of soporific silence, he leaned forward and hissed: “I’ve got it! The boy with the braces is not only secretly gay, but in love with his friend, who isn’t!”
“Could that be it?” said Dennis.
“It would explain why the boy with the braces only looks at his friend,” said Kent, “and has no desire to talk to anyone else. It would explain why their towels weren’t together. It would explain how unhappy the boy with the braces seems. If I were barely twenty-one, tall and skinny, with braces on my teeth, and in love with a friend who was everything I wasn’t and wanted to be, and who could not be in love with me, because he was straight, I’d be miserable, too! In fact,” he said, “I was all those things, minus the braces, at his age. I was so depressed I went to bed for an entire week after graduation because I and my best friend had to part. He went to Kenya to work, and I went home to my parents, where I went upstairs to my room and lay in bed for seven days, because as far as I was concerned, life had come to a complete end.”
“Poor baby,” said Dennis, putting his hand on his boyfriend’s.
“But now look at me,” said Kent as he put his hand on top of Dennis’s.
“Of course,” he added, “the friendly one does have a superb body.”
“He has a body that would sink ships,” said Dennis. “I’d kill for his stomach. And chest. And shoulders. You know, the awful thing about the gym is there is really nothing you can do for shoulders. Not really.”
“The other one has a beautiful body, too,” I said. “In fact, I find him really more attractive.”
“That’s because you like nerds,” said Dennis.
I did like nerds; which meant the memory of his white, lanky body shifting on his towel in the sunlight, before they were aware of our presence, was with me now—though glance as I might across the room, he would not return the look. They sat there in silence, like a married couple who have been together such a long time they have run out of things to say, and then, just when it seemed they must look around the room to find a topic of interest, their conversation resumed—though the boy with the braces retained his melancholy mask.
“You know, if there has been any advantage to the past ten years,” said Dennis, “it’s been that I’ve learned not to pine over people who can’t possibly return my interest. One simply accepts the fact and moves on. But when you’re nineteen, or whatever he is, you don’t know that. You can’t move on. You’re terrified to move on, because moving on may mean—ending up like us! That’s why he refuses to look at or speak to us. He wants nothing to do with queens—all he wants in this world is his friend—which I can perfectly understand, though I’d love to walk right over there now and tell him we know what he’s going through.”
“That love is like a wasting wound,” I said, “no tropic sun can cure.”
“I think that scans,” Kent said. “It does, doesn’t it? That love is like a wasting wound no tropic sun can cure! We should go over right now and tell him that!”
“Well, why don’t you?” said Dennis.
“Because we are all trapped in social rules, rules that maintain propriety and privacy,” said Kent, as he picked up his wine. “On the other hand, I think of that lovely line of Rilke’s. Rilke said the world is filled with dragons only waiting for us to kiss them to be changed into princesses.”
“What a divine idea!” said Dennis, and, with this thought, they stared into one another’s eyes, and then turned their gazes on the table in the corner. The couple in question chose that moment, however, to get up and leave the dining room. The outgoing one smiled at us as they passed; the boy with the braces stared down at the tiles as if being led off to jail. At that moment the stage manager in the corner put his head back and began to sing, in one of those rich, quavering voices you hear only in piano bars, “Full moooon and empty arms ...”
“I can’t believe it,” whispered Dennis as the stage manager threw up his arms with a jangle of jewelry on his wrists.
We watched as Peggy came out with a tray of flan and delivered the cups to all the tables.
“I am thinking of another line,” said Kent drunkenly, “this one from a letter by Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter. It goes: ‘All life has is youth, or the love of youth in others.’”
Dennis looked up from his custard.
“Was Fitzgerald a chicken queen?” he said.
“He was a romantic!” Kent said: “The same thing, I suppose. The point is we love the mystery couple because they’re young—and innocent. But the boy with braces came here to be alone with his friend—not to be leered at by us.”
“Speak for yourself!” said the stage manager, who seemed to think the distance between our tables immaterial. “What you want to tell them is—there’s nothing to be afraid of! I’ve never been happier than I am now! I’m on this beautiful island having the time of my life! And when I go back to New York I love my life there, too! You know? It’s more fun, in fact, than it is at their age, in many ways, when you’re worried about so many stupid things. But try telling them that! Try telling that to people who look at you and see only one thing—old age and death!” At this he cackled, stood up in his aquamarine caftan, spread his arms out like a great bird opening his wings, and left the dining room.
“Awfully chatty,” said Dennis the minute he was gone. “And what he fails to realize is that I regard him the same way the mystery couple regard us!” “Three very different generations. He’s singing songs to them they’ve never even heard. Why, I bet those boys, even if they are gay, have never even heard of Noël Coward—much less Ruth Draper.”
“Ignorance is like a delicate and exotic fruit,” said Kent. “Touch it and the bloom is gone.”
We stared at him.
“Oscar Wilde,” he said.
“I’m sure they wish the four of us weren’t here,” said Dennis.
“But we are, and I love to look at them!” said the stage manager, returning for his cigarettes.
“But we mustn’t,” said Dennis. “We must give them that courtesy.”
“You can, not me,” the stage manager said. “At my stage in life, there’s nothing you can do but look.” And with that he left the dining room again.
In the morning at breakfast we were careful not to stare at them, though this time they both shared in the public babble of tips on beaches, adjusting your face mask, and ferry schedules. Then they grew visibly bored as the couple from Cincinnati began talking of bicycle tours of the Auvergne and finally excused themselves, while the stage manager made ready his chaise longue for yet another day of reading beside the antiquated pool whose bubbles rose like those from the air hose of a diver in an old adventure movie. Outside the day was dazzling—the wind tossing the palm tree tops about like shirts on a clothesline in the blazing light. Knowing he had one day left, Dennis became even more demanding about the photographs. First, he wanted pictures of them in the waves, then atop a coral cliff, then in a grove of palm trees, then close-ups beside a hibiscus and even the interior of the hibiscus itself. Then he said: “Please take a picture of that crab on my suntan lotion.”
“That’s the kind of shot you don’t want,” I said.
“I know. But I’d like the crab,” said Dennis. “It’s so pretty. Pretty please? After all, you are my official honeymoon photographer.”
“I know,” I said. “But you have more than enough shots by now. Believe me, you’ll have plenty for the scrapbooks.”
“Well, I hope so,” said Dennis with a sigh. “I sincerely hope so. Because that may be all I have.”
“What do you mean?” I said, as we watched Kent attempting the backstroke in the choppy waves.
“I mean one is simply aware that there are magic moments in life that do not last—if you get my drift.”
“Like this one?” I said.
“Yes. Because—let me be frank—we both know that while I adore Kent, I don’t know how much longer this marriage can last, because, like most people, he is not without his problems.”
“For instance.”
Dennis looked over at me.
“A fondness for the grape,” he said.
“He’s drinking?”
“Yes—which means he’s got problems this girl can’t do anything about—which means it’s important for me to get photos while I can.”
“You mean you’re already planning to divorce him while you’re on your honeymoon,” I said.
“There’s always hope!” he said. “But one does have to think ahead. That’s why I want to tell the boy with braces to just get over the pretty one. Because let’s face it—there’s a lot more where he came from. Now, listen, dear—I will probably be asleep when the English aristocrat emerges from the water, but when he does,” he said, looking over at me, “when he does, you make sure you get the money shot. I want him just as he comes out, streaming with seawater, because he’s so pretty with his hair slicked down, and that glistening washboard stomach. Promise?”
“Promise,” I said.
Instead I fell asleep not long after Dennis. When I awoke my friends were arguing about the couple.
“This isn’t the end of the world,” said Dennis. “He’s going to have lots of boyfriends after this one. Lots!”
“But don’t you see? None of them will mean as much,” said Kent. “None of them will be what this one is—because the first time you fall in love, the world is still entire, it hasn’t been split up into a thousand little truths. Your first love is your first feeling that you can unlock the door—the door of life, with all its potential for happiness, for union with another soul. It’s your first ecstatic contact with the current that runs the universe!”
“So what am I?” said Dennis. “Chopped liver?”
“No, no, darling,” said Kent, “you are a very fine pâté.”
That evening there were several empty tables. Half the guests had gone, and the inviolate air of privacy that held sway over the diners whose faces glowed above the little shells in which the candles burned seemed slightly less inviolate. The stage manager raised his glass of wine to us; we raised ours to his. The homosexuals now outnumbered their opposites. But this hardly seemed to our advantage. In the middle of the night I woke to the sound of arguing and knocked on the door of my friends’ room. Dennis stood in the doorway of the bathroom holding a towel filled with ice cubes to his head. “He hit me,” he said. “He hit me!”
I looked over at his consort, who lay there with a pillow over his head discolored with vomit.
The next morning I walked them to the boat and watched it go around the headland.
The rest of my days on the island were spent in solitude; in the dining room, where I sat alone, happy to watch the other guests. Then the rest began to vanish, one by one, back to the mainland—till only four of us remained. Alone in my room I watched the woman cut flowers in her backyard: a synecdoche of domestic life. The nights continued starry, the days, even when it rained, were more beautiful afterward. The wild horses began to graze nearer the hotel. The two young men got more healthy-looking and handsome with each passing day—as if, with the departure of each guest, they could blossom a bit more, like flowers. Every day I took a road I’d not walked before and came upon another lagoon, another beach, another sea grape grove. When I returned to the hotel at dusk, however, the human wish to share these discoveries was confined to conversation with Peggy as she served me dinner: the curse of traveling alone. The two young men babbled away at their table. The stage manager read a novel by Gordon Merrick as he drank wine and smoked cigarettes, looking up every now and then to take in the youth and beauty across the room. One evening I walked back down the hill to the village. The young man ignoring the majestic sky was still in the phone booth. He was a synecdoche, too: of what I was not sure. In the morning I waited for the woman to clip gardenias, her blue nightgown blowing in the breeze. Then one day I heard the boy with the braces ask Peggy about boats back to Fajardo as she served them their toast and orange juice. When they were done eating, the outgoing one said to the stage manager, “Have a good day,” as he passed his table on the way out. The stage manager turned to me and said: “Have a good day! I can get that by dialing my bank!” Then he remarked, “Lately I’ve begun to realize that I’ve seen that boy somewhere. I’ve seen him somewhere and I cannot remember. Isn’t that maddening? I can’t remember where and yet I know I’ve seen him before.”
Five years later I found out. During that period we did not go to the island anymore; the dollar was so strong, people started going to Brazil instead. That trip involved a night flight, too. After a week in Rio de Janeiro we would return to Manhattan at dawn. The snowy streets of brownstones the taxi went down at that hour made the city look like a town in northern Germany: sober and bourgeois. The sleeping people, the cold facades, the fresh snow on the garbage cans and side-walks, seemed to rebuke the sweaty bodies on the beach at Ipanema and in the clubs downtown. And I began to wonder why we had to go so far to find the sensual. One year I was the last person in the cab. Too awake to go home, I asked the driver to take me to a club in the West Forties where, on Sunday morning, I knew the party of the previous night would still be going. But I was wrong. Only a small crowd of people remained watching a stripper on stage. The stripper, however, looked familiar. It was the boy with the braces. Only now he was the boy with a snake wrapped around his body, undulating to the sound of Donna Summer singing “Love to Love You Baby.”
It was a small club with only one exit, for performers and customers alike. I waited after closing for him to come out. He laughed when I told him about our obsession with him and his friend on the island. No one had been right, as it turned out. They had been stripping in a club in San Juan at the time—which was where the stage manager had no doubt seen him—and were taking a little vacation; and the last thing they wanted to deal with was our desire.