The Go-Between

1.

It is hard to believe that I was so wild then. But in Anchorage in 1981, that’s what was done: dirty bookstores, all-night bars, downers, poppers, coke, sex. Was I going to say no to that? Throw a wet blanket on the zeitgeist just because it made me uncomfortable?

Besides, that’s how I met Jacques—that summer, stripped to his shorts, doing pirouettes on the dance floor at the Village Disco—sweat spinning off his muscular body like a lawn sprinkler. (I’d probably wedged myself into the standard uniform: 501s and a white T-shirt.) Jacques tore through the dance floor that night like he tore through men. They loved to hear him talk dirty in French-Canadian while he fucked.

I was one of them. For that night and for a while after, he was my sexy Quebecker and I his blond bon ami. We banged around downtown Anchorage like Astérix and Obélix—hitting the 5th Avenue bars, drinking martinis (a habit Jacques acquired at his home in Montreal from his père), doing lines of coke off the counter with shirtless bartenders.

It was the post-pipeline boom, money and men flowing like the oil, back and forth from Anchorage to the North Slope. Guys came off three weeks of twelve-hour days, seven days a week, to party and get their rocks off.

As for myself, I was just out of college, determined in this place of reinvention and mystery to shake up my boring self. I adopted the motto of the moment: so many men, so little time. Still, I panicked when Jacques no longer wished to bed his blond, mustachioed little buddy and moved to the next in line, Stephen Traynor. I doubled my efforts to ingratiate myself with them and their friends, a hard-partying bunch who, like Jacques, never seemed to work. Drug dealing was the rumor, though if that were true for Jacques, he sheltered me from it. I ran into those friends of theirs everywhere—at the Raven, at the Jade Room. I’d chat them up at the health clinic when we were being treated for clap. I even played with some in dirty bookstore stalls and bragged to Jacques about it after. I thought it was a way in.

This was my last-ditch attempt at fabulousness, the monumental failure at which Jacques was mercifully amused. He valued me for being stalwart, as ballast for his ever-shifting Ship of Fools. It was he, in fact, who suggested I renounce la débauche and take up my studies in engineering, his father’s profession and one he knew I held in high regard.

Also, the plague was among us, which put that crazy time in closed parenthesis.

2.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to a midsummer garden party. The host is a refugee from those Glory Hole days as well. He accompanies me now to the opera and the symphony, which is about as crazy as we ever get. His garden retains a touch of wildness, though: fireweed, cow parsnip, and devil’s club. Plants of the forest or the side of the road.

At the garden party I filled my plate and went out to the deck to search for a place to sit. Though it was almost eight o’clock in the evening, the sun was high and cast shimmery circles through the leaves of an ash tree onto the white tablecloths. There was that particular smell of an arctic summer: under the profusion of new green, the moldy-leafed decay of years past. I took a seat at a table among some fellows I know and, to my surprise, who should be across from me but Stephen Traynor. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since the mid-80s. I recognized him instantly, though. His complexion was like rose alabaster—no doubt from his old habit, a rigorous application of facial cream—and he was handsome still, deep-set eyes and a dimpled chin. His face had become jowly, though, and his belly overhung his belt. (I’ve fared better since I retain my slavish devotion to the gym.) Back in the day, we were forced into an accommodation because of our mutual friendship with Jacques, but, try as I might, we never became friends. In fact, his catty remarks about my stodginess, though cloaked in humor, had often seemed excessively barbed. We had all shared many cheerful moments, nonetheless, and through several helpings of prime rib, he and I joked and reminisced.

The party was festive and it was after midnight by the time I drove Stephen to his budget hotel in mid-Anchorage. The Chugach Mountains, the green wall emblazoned with patches of snow that borders the back of the city, were ruddy with alpenglow. For old times’ sake, we stopped along the way at the Kodiak, formerly our old haunt, the Village Disco. Though the place had greatly changed, in tenor it remained the same. It was the middle of the week, and there was only a smattering of regulars, but if I squinted, the scene before me was from almost thirty years ago. There was José, the three-hundred-pound drag queen, seated at his spot at the corner; Sugar Bear, down in his cups on his night off from bartending at the Jade Room; and a couple of twinks on the dance floor grinding in time with the music.

I thought Stephen and I might walk down Memory Lane a bit more. But his usually jolly face grew hard, his eyes squinty and mean. He showed little interest in talking further about old times, or in my subsequent accomplishments, but seemed principally motivated to grill me about Jacques. Had I seen him? When had we last spoken? How could he be reached?

Jacques had been Stephen’s first great love, and he had breathed in the Quebecker the way a drowning man gasps for air. Except for its urgency, I would have attributed the inquiry that night to a middle-aged man’s nostalgia for lost love. On our second drink, the urgency was in part explained when he filled in details of a story which I knew only in broad strokes.

In 1983, Jacques started up an import business—high-end furniture and accessories for the newly minted rich in their big homes on the hillside. He had tired of partying and threw himself into the enterprise. He was determined not to take advantage of his family’s fortune and connections in doing this. He didn’t want to provide his father with even the slightest consolation.

As it happened, Stephen became an entrepreneur himself. With money inherited from his grandfather, he participated in the general real estate frenzy overheating the Anchorage economy. Over the next two years, he became one of the city’s condo kings, riding the wave of oil.

He and Jacques moved in together in Stephen’s own large house on the hillside. The view from their deck was spectacular: Denali, Foraker, and Hunter (the huge mountains visible in the distance to the north), the Alaska Range trailing eastward down the Inlet, sugar-frosted and spiky. They hosted fabulous parties, like a couple of Jay Gatsbys. In the summer light that ran without interruption from dusk straight into dawn, bearded men draped off deck rails, played in a foamy hot tub, popped pills from a fishbowl on the kitchen’s Carrara countertop.

All this I knew mostly from hearsay. What I had not heard was the account of their affair’s abrupt end. One day, Stephen said, then paused for effect. One day, he said, Jacques disappeared, not to be heard from since.

3.

I tried to put all this together as I made my way up the hillside to my house, a sprawling affair not far from the one that had formerly been Stephen’s. After the real estate crash of the mid-80s, people left Anchorage by the thousands. So in that, Jacques’ disappearance wasn’t extraordinary. But the urgency of Stephen’s inquiry and the dramatic manner in which he delivered his news, led me to believe there was something he was hiding.

All this dredging up of the past unleashed a torrent and memories of Jacques flooded my thoughts. I recalled the weekend he and I traveled to Montreal. (This was his way of softening the blow for having recently thrown me over for Stephen.) He promised to introduce me to his père, a force in provincial politics and a noted engineer. I was soon entering the program at the University of Alaska and Jacques thought I might benefit from a confab with his father. The meeting never took place; they’d taken up their spat again by the time we arrived. The old man wanted Jacques to leave off wasting time in our frontier town and return to his studies in Montreal. Jacques refused, and not in a nice way. Though my French is creaky, I believe what Jacques yelled into the phone means “leave the country” but is usually translated “fuck-off.”

Our hotel reservations extended through a long weekend, so Jacques decided we’d make the best of it and tour the city. When he stood me up for the second time at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, I realized I’d had enough. All the missed appointments throughout our friendship, the late entrances, the feeble apologies (or none at all) and me at a restaurant with ice cubes melted in my glass. No amount of Gaulish charme could make up for that. I rebooked my flight, and though Jacques protested in that passionate Quebecker way of his, I don’t think he minded. I had the feeling he’d rather smoke dope and hang with his high school pals, his copains.

I remember the lights on the St. Lawrence the last night, like undulating neon, below the bulk of Mont-Royal and, from the plane, the city twinkling through the clouds.

Back in Anchorage, over the following year my friendship with Jacques and Stephen lingered, grew tepid, invitations to their parties far between. At last, it fizzled. University was demanding. I lectured myself: eliminate unnecessary distractions! I lost touch. I could no longer stave off the inevitable: we were simply not a good fit.

4.

At my friend’s garden party, I had exchanged contact info with Stephen and I emailed the next day, saying how glad I was to have run into him. That those heady days of our youth, though fraught, were nevertheless grand, and I was happy our visit had allowed me the occasion to remember them.

His reply, though somewhat chilly, was impeccably polite. He added this unusual postscript which delivered the aha I had been seeking. Back in 1983, Stephen had taken loans on his properties to jumpstart Jacques’ import business. Jacques was out of his depth, and immediately the concern began to sour. Bills unpaid to manufacturers, customs fees stranding inventory in Seattle on the docks. No inventory, no business.

As a result, when the Anchorage boom went bust and Stephen was unable to make his loan payments, all his properties perished in the equation. He recouped not one centime, a setback from which it had taken him decades to recover.

He started from scratch in San Francisco: an assortment of jobs (clothing salesman, timeshare purveyor, assistant to a real estate developer). Finally, with the easy money available in the early aughts, he began developing properties on his own.

Although unstated, his urgency to find Jacques now became clear. It’s 2009, and while we Alaskans suck happily at the pap of Big Oil, the rest of the world teeters at the abyss, in the throes of the Great Recession. Stephen needed money.

After one boomtown disaster, you could hardly find fault with his desperation at the prospect of another. I sent him a short condolatory reply, then deleted his email, as I did not expect or wish to hear from him again.

5.

Thoughts of Jacques continued to nag me. Everywhere there were reminders: my French housekeeper, an Atom Egoyan DVD from Netflix, the Stanley Cup on television at the gym. My lack of spontaneity has been replaced by a thoroughness in my personal and professional lives, and I could not let Jacques rest.

One night—I’d had a bit too much Burgundy—I Googled him. Jacques Turcot. Three pages of hits. His companies out of Montreal and Vancouver: Jacques Turcot, LTD.; Turcot Frères Import-Export; Turcot Asia, a subsidiary out of Vietnam. (It seemed le père Turcot had taken the black sheep back into the fold.) And surprisingly, a Monsieur J. Turcot, candidat, Bloc Québécois, District électorale fédérale La Pointe-de-l’Île, Montréal. There was a campaign website, a LinkedIn page, but no personal contacts. Just official phone and email.

There were pictures, though—one of him chummy at a Montreal Fashion Week party with Jean Paul Gaultier; another at Le Festival des Films du Monde on the red carpet with Céline Dion draped from one arm; another of him looking dashing, cooing to a baby at a political event.

6.

At work the next morning, I thought to call Stephen at his hotel to relay these findings, but decided the better for it. Obsessed with Jacques as he now seemed to be, doubtless Stephen knew all this already and was preoccupied making inquiries of Jacques’ old friends.

Besides, I had to prepare for a trip to Seattle. The engineering firm of which I am a partner was in merger talks with a large international company. The countercyclical nature of our economy makes Alaska one of the few places where investing is profitable. Now, like me, Anchorage is grown up, responsible. Most of the bars and bookstores downtown from the boom days have been demolished, replaced by an upscale shopping mall and a palace for the performing arts.

Beginning my career, I dreamed of engineering structures like these, but my talents have led me elsewhere. I am an excellent negotiator, a tactician, and an amply capable project administrator. My creativity lies in my personal life: I possess a large set of friends, all interesting in their own way—engineers and contractors, mostly—women and men both, gay and straight. My family in Texas adores me, and we visit every second year. Though single, I do not lack for boyfriends, men who, at our age, consider reliability a desirable asset.

7.

I was staying at the W Hotel in downtown Seattle. After a long day of negotiations, I was tired and ready for bed. I switched off my cell and was about to slip between the hotel’s impossibly silky sheets when the landline rang. The receptionist at the front desk was apologetic, professional. Even so, I was about to be short with her when she said there appeared to be a matter of some urgency. A Jacques Turcot was on the house phone. Would I take the call?

My breath hitched. I thought for a moment it might be a joke. After Jacques proved his bona fides, we agreed to meet in the cocktail lounge downstairs. In the elevator as I descended, each floor my heart beat louder.

We settled into leather chairs in a dimly lit corner. He was thinner than I remembered, with a white streak down the front of his thick black coiffure, which gave him a decidedly patrician air.

Jacques explained his assistants had located me via the Internet. Two of them sat near us on a sectional, a boy and a girl in their twenties, baluster-thin, their oriental faces washed in the glow of their iPhones. Scheduling problems, Jacques said. He told me he frequently traveled on business to Seattle and considered our meeting fated when he found that particular weekend I would be there as well. Precisely how that was determined, he would not say. My office would not have given out the information.

The waitress delivered our drinks—martinis, for lost times, Jacques said to me and winked. I felt cowed and a little turned on.

He brought himself to the point. His people had made him aware his bad behavior toward Stephen Traynor was becoming the cause of a certain difficulty. Apart from that, he had shame, and because they once had loved, he would like to set things right. It had become messy, though; Stephen had made some little threats. For this, Jacques blamed himself. He wished to meet with Stephen, but evidently a complicated reencounter must not be. They had hired lawyers, of course, private detectives, but to take the scent from the hound, Jacques still felt the matter needed the personal touch. He understood at present Stephen was in Anchorage trying to sniff him out. He paused, then said sweetly that he knew he could count on me to do him une petite gentillesse.

8.

By mid-week, the merger negotiations were bogged down over our company’s evaluation—something for the number crunchers to resolve—so I headed back to Anchorage to attend to the favor Jacques had asked of me.

I was to pick up the money he owed Stephen (plus interest) at a Vietnamese restaurant on Spenard Road, an area that still retains a whiff of its original rough and tumble. There are bars on either side of the street where at night hookers roam like wildlife in its natural habitat.

On the day of the meeting, an assistant called to reschedule. That appointment also was broken. Finally, the time was set for Monday night, and though it contradicted Jacques’ wishes that I alone handle the transfer of funds, that morning on a whim I called Stephen. He was livid—jealous, I suppose that I had been selected for the duty—but excited for the money; excited, too, I think, at the prospect of any possible communication with Jacques. Whether for retribution or reconciliation, I couldn’t tell.

Because of the meeting, I cut short my dinner engagement at the home of a man who, I admit, really interests me. He’s that rare bird, an artist who doesn’t at all mind my fastidiousness. We ended the evening at his front door with a lingering kiss and made plans for the coming weekend. I then collected Stephen at his hotel, and as we drove the short distance to our assignation, we chatted amiably.

The restaurant was closed, but a bald, sallow-faced individual answered the door. We followed him through a corridor to a back office. He sat behind a desk and presented me with a sheet of paper, which Stephen snatched away. The man shrugged, drew the corners of his mouth down, then handed Stephen a pen.

Bursts of air from flared nostrils accompanied Stephen’s reading of the document.

The sallow-faced man took a manila envelope from a desk drawer, thumbed one corner, and after several minutes said, He sign, or no?

Whatever, Stephen said. With the pen, he quickly scrawled his name and slid the sheet of paper back across the desktop.

Wiggling his head slightly, the man looked at me, looked at Stephen, then handed him the manila envelope.

Out of it spilled onto the desk a glossy photo of the three of us at the Raven, young and trim, looking like lumberjacks in our tight jeans and plaid flannel shirts. Jacques stood smiling between Stephen and me, his arms flung over both of our shoulders.

Stephen flicked the photo away, which revealed a smaller envelope. This contained a cashier’s check and a short note. He rolled his eyes and thrust the note in my face. It read:

Cher, désolé. So sorry. Forgive me.

As I drove Stephen back to his hotel, he didn’t say a word. It seemed clear he nursed his disappointment: no billet-doux, no Jacques. A tiger cannot change his stripes. What did Stephen expect?

In the rearview mirror, Cook Inlet’s waters glimmered in the sun. Though late for a weeknight, traffic was heavy, others bound for appointments, too keyed up by the long day’s light to go home. I attempted some pleasantry. Stephen’s face soured. He turned away. It was as if, uninteresting as he had always seemed to find me, I wasn’t even there.

This stung, certainly. Angered me. But I reminded myself, I had my life. It didn’t matter, this old story.