Allen Mourning

AFTER THE INITIAL SHOCK, the sense of somehow mistakenly being caught in the flash of his own camera, Allen had been cool enough, convincing himself as well as his lawyer and then the judge that his presence at the party had been professional, that he had not known ahead of time what kind of a party it would be. He did not say his intention would have been to get evidence to turn over to the police, but he didn’t stop his lawyer from indicating that might have been his natural course. The photographs were already in police hands. Allen’s sharing in the guilt would do nothing to help his host, who had obviously been set up by one enemy or another. Charges against Allen and several others were dropped.

Allen was angry with the newspapers, but he was too much in the business himself not to know that abusing friendship was a daily minor cost of getting out the news. He did know that dropping of the charges would be duly reported. Not as many people would read that. Some of those who did would assume some sort of payoff. He would get no indignant sympathy in any quarter. He had served too many scandals in a professional capacity to claim the protection of any ordinary citizen. Nobody is ever on the side of the photographer, even at a wedding, and so Allen thought it should be. What was harder to calculate was who would care enough to let it interfere in any way with giving Allen assignments. Certainly the homosexuals in high places in government would avoid him. He’d had his last season in Ottawa for a while.

If editors of magazines ran into outright refusals there, they might be leery of giving Allen the kind of assignment he’d been particularly good at in the past, which was convincing people who were camera-shy and not in need of publicity that it was a privilege to sit for him. He could get into great houses or hospital rooms by indicating that his photographs would serve the real importance of the person or event. He understood people’s fear of being trivialized or exploited along with their need to be acknowledged. His job was to allay the fear and nourish the need while getting the best picture he could for his own purposes. His own purposes were always professional. He did not indulge his prejudices. Now his question was how many other people would indulge theirs against him, technically innocent or not.

It had not occurred to Allen that the story would be picked up by the Vancouver papers. No national figures were involved, unless he could make a modest claim for himself, and he didn’t ever publicly identify himself with Vancouver. His telephone answering service was in Toronto. He only worried that Pierre might somehow get the story through the gay grapevine before Allen had a chance to explain it properly. He hoped Alma had taken care of that.

On the plane, though he brooded about threats to his income and about the dirty political games being indulged in to put men in jail for such frivolity, as he neared Vancouver, his spirits began to lift. He decided he had managed the whole business remarkably well, given what could have happened, and he’d soon be looking at it as one of the many narrow escapes his life seemed to be made up of. He even toyed with the possibility that he wouldn’t have to say anything at all to Pierre. There were the familiar mountains, white with their first winter snows—a marvelous time of year on the coast where you could still sail on a bright November day—out there right under the nose of industry. He probably couldn’t persuade Pierre, whose blood had grown thin all these years in a mild climate. It was enough simply to see the sailboats out in the bay. He was home, and he was going to stay at home for a good long while now, the Rocky Mountains between him and the public world, safe even from his own taste for it.

Joseph did not so much meet Allen as join him as he left the airport. Allen’s first impression was that it was an odd coincidence, Joseph walking there beside him.

“Is Ann meeting you?” he asked.

“No, she’s home with the children.”

“Shall we share a cab?” Allen was efficient in stowing his luggage and settling them both. “I’ll drop you off then, shall I?”

“I’d just as soon go back to your house,” Joseph said.

Used to Joseph’s idiosyncrasies, Allen gave his own address and then asked, “So where have you been?”

“Nowhere,” Joseph said. “I came to meet you.”

Allen stiffened to new attention, but surely there was nothing wrong. Joseph’s face was tender; it was always tender. No one would send Joseph as a messenger of bad news.

“That’s very nice of you,” Allen said. “Even Pierre can’t be bothered anymore I’m in and out so often. You’re looking well.”

“I am well,” Joseph said. “Allen, the Toronto business … it got into the papers.”

“Hell!” Allen said. “Pierre hasn’t seen it, has he? He never reads the paper. Anyway, I phoned Alma last night. Joseph, what is it?”

“Pierre’s dead. He killed himself.”

Allen felt as disoriented as he had when the police arrived at the party. Perhaps he was simply in the wrong cab being mistaken for the wrong person, even in the wrong city, though the bridge over the Eraser was familiar enough, and Joseph was no stranger to him. But Joseph, of course, was crazy.

“I’m sorry,” Allen said, wanting to be gentle, for whatever Joseph’s grief was, it was real to him.

“I had to notify the police,” Joseph said. “Roxanne was afraid, because of the papers, that they’d search the house, but they didn’t.”

“Well, that’s good,” Allen said cautiously. “They’ve dropped the charges in Toronto.”

“That’s good,” Joseph said, a stammer there underneath the will in his voice.

“So,” Allen said, taking a deep breath, which he spent on a silly laugh. “Maybe we can get all this straightened out.”

“Roxanne had to break a couple of windows to get in because of the double deadlocks.”

“That’s all right. What’re a couple of windows?”

The journey seemed to take hours. Allen staked his patience on arriving, being able to get out of this irrational script and into his own house. Even after they finally arrived, Allen paid the cab driver attentively, remembered his luggage, and he noticed the combination of red berries on the mountain ash and the second bloom of the dogwood, almost as satisfying a signal of the time of year as white sails against white mountains. As he turned the key in the front door, he also controlled a sharp desire to call Pierre’s name and end this sinister charade, but he could not yet seem to break that free of it.

Once inside, Allen left Joseph standing in the living room. From room to room Allen went, and there was no one there. He went through the house again, this time as if he had taken out a search warrant, hurling open closet doors, bureau drawers, cupboards, flinging clothes and papers on the floor. Joseph did nothing to restrain him, and he could not restrain himself, though he had very little idea what he was doing. Pierre could not possibly be dead, not with all this evidence: his shirts, his childish underwear, his miniature shoes, his French Canadian novels and cookbooks. It was a silly trick, and Allen would find the clue to it or find Pierre. Finally Allen came out of their bedroom, exasperated.

“All right. I give up. Where is he?”

“At the morgue.”

“This is enough of a joke!” Allen shouted. “I’ve had it! Do you hear me? Where is he? What have you done with him?”

“He couldn’t be left in the house,” Joseph said. “Allen, sit down. Allen, listen. I have to help you understand. Pierre’s dead.”

“I don’t like that,” Allen said.

“I know.”

Surely he could call his Vancouver lawyer. They’d bailed Pierre out of silliness before. It didn’t matter how much it cost. Allen was staring at a new stain on the living-room rug. He knelt down and touched it with his fingers, then drew back from the dampness.

“I cleaned up as much as I could,” Joseph said.

Bloodstains on the carpet? It was like something you’d see in London at a matinee with your aunt. Allen had always told Pierre, if there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was straight camp. Pierre had never betrayed Allen’s taste before.

“I’m embarrassed,” he said aloud, surprised. Mortally embarrassed.

In the days ahead, Allen came to believe that was Pierre’s exact state when he killed himself, his own taste having been so badly betrayed. Guilt made Allen wretched; loneliness was physically painful; the terrible stupidity of it tipped his accustomed cynicism into bitterness.

The only business calls he had were cancellations, some curt, some—usually from magazine editors—nervous with false sympathy. None of it mattered to Allen. He couldn’t have worked if he’d wanted to, his hands having developed a palsy which would make holding a camera impossible. But he didn’t want to. He had worked for Pierre.

At first he saw no one but Joseph, that because Joseph had come unbidden and stayed. He was a curious comfort. Allen felt less exposed by his own craziness since Joseph had lived through and witnessed all kinds of derangements. But Allen didn’t indulge in any false displays of grief either, as he might have with someone like Alma. Joseph had gone through enough pain to be spared anything but what was essential, which was what couldn’t be helped.

“I try to blame them instead of myself,” Allen tried to explain. “I try to say they killed him, not I.”

“He killed himself,” Joseph said, as a matter of fact.

At some moments, Pierre seemed to Allen the supreme good example, and Allen wanted to follow him in it, not just to be done with living but to have the last word, a martyr’s revenge. Pierre’s death had not been publicly linked with the Toronto arrests. Allen’s would be, but his pain was too severe for him not to want to see the results of whatever action he took.

“Ann says you must have dinners with us for a while,” Joseph said.

Allen didn’t want to go, but he had lost his firm hand metaphorically as well as physically, and he had to use anyone else’s kindly decision as a way to get from one moment to the next. When that plump, bespectacled little woman gave Allen a sisterly kiss in greeting, he felt himself shaking with a gratitude that also appalled him. He had not known her power to reject until she welcomed him. How could he survive such vulnerability?

Rachel and Susan, who had been such grave, flighty children, had moved into a new season Allen didn’t understand. One moment they presented themselves as interesting, intelligent people, but, if you responded in kind, they dissolved into wriggling self-consciousness. If you dealt with them as the silly children they’d become, they resented it fiercely. Allen delighted in the coquettishness of boys that age, who didn’t seem to him a mass of emotional contradictions; they were greedy, tender, loyal, self-centered, all of a piece, and they responded predictably, as girls did not. Allen, who had none of Pierre’s aesthetic prejudices against women, could only appreciate and understand a female when she had become a mother, that faint fragrance of blood and milk that could linger about a woman years after she had nursed a child, on beyond menopause. Ann, obviously sensing that the girls would be no entertainment, called them away to tend the baby and set the table, leaving Joseph and Allen alone together, as they had been for great stretches of time over the last few days.

“I’ve just assumed you aren’t teaching,” Allen said, normal concerns suddenly occurring to him as they hadn’t in days.

“I asked for a few days off. By now they don’t ask questions.”

“I hadn’t even thought.”

“I’m really well,” Joseph said. “I won’t even need my regular amount of sick leave this year.”

“That’s really good.”

“I thought it was the tranquilizers, but I’ve stopped taking them, even in the last few days.”

“Is there anything to drink?”

“I’m sorry,” Joseph said. “Of course. I forget—I still do forget.”

Allen wanted Joseph to be able to talk about himself, his illness, his health, his job, his children, anything. Listening made Allen nervous. He couldn’t concentrate on what anyone else said, even Joseph, who was so quiet and brief. All Allen seemed able to do was pick up the broken pieces of these last few days off the floor of his mind and offer them to someone—Joseph—for verification. Joseph had reconfirmed Pierre’s suicide a dozen times a day. Allen had progressed to offering it himself as a statement rather than a question. And he had done some of the practical things, disposing of Pierre’s body, with Joseph’s help. Allen did not identify it. He couldn’t have. He simply wrote the check for cremation. He had felt like the commandant of Buchenwald, sending that beloved body to the furnace, but the hysterical grief of that violent act was soon over as grief at gradual decay would not have been. Joseph had also helped him bundle all Pierre’s clothes into the car and take them to the Salvation Army bin in the Safeway parking lot. Allen would have felt safer to have them burned, too, fearing their resurrection on another slight-bodied creature, fearing things more nebulous, evidence of a crime. Joseph had let Allen talk when he could, cry, wander off.

“Thank you,” Allen said, accepting vodka on ice. “I want to be able to listen to you. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Joseph said. “When we both were good listeners, we weren’t as good friends.”

Sitting at Joseph’s table, Allen had a sudden insight into the reason Joseph had kept his domestic life secret for so long, protecting it even more rigidly than Allen had protected his own. It had taken Joseph these years to master the ordinary, be really at home in it. Joy sat next to him in her high chair, kicking a bedroom slipper into the stew which he was trying to dish up. Susan initiated a low-pitched, lusty giggle, but before Rachel could take it up, Ann had signaled them both so that they sat in precarious grown-up postures, waiting for their food. Joseph lived among and for these four females. Allen could have expected antlers to begin sprouting out of those tufts of feathery hair.

Ann was the sort of woman all men idealized if they noticed her, but very few men would have the courage or sense to want to marry her. Men married for lust, for money, for power, for safety and convenience, rarely to be companion to woman as they dream her to be, faithful, fertile, enduring, tender.

The male does not endure—he sells out, goes crazy, kills himself.

“Eat, Allen,” Ann said, a hand on his arm.

He picked up his knife and fork dutifully. For her sake, he even made an attempt to notice what he was eating. At this table he could not be pariah, saint, or lunatic if he could help it. He had to be a man, eating his dinner. It had taken Joseph years to master it, but he had. There he sat at the head of his table, feeding his child.

Allen suddenly remembered Joseph standing shivering in his shorts on that first cold day on the beach. His willingness had turned a mildly sadistic joke into an abiding friendship. Why couldn’t I have risked being ordinary? Allen wanted to cry out. Why isn’t this my table? But he kept silent and went on eating.

Joseph seemed in no hurry to go back to work, but Allen, once he understood, could not accept Joseph’s truant company.

“I’m perfectly all right. I have other people I ought to see, some tactful silences to break.”

“Oh,” Joseph said. “Alma is … She told Roxanne she didn’t want … It’s the boys … and Mike. Anyway …”

Allen grabbed Joseph by the arm. “You can say Pierre is dead with ease. There shouldn’t be anything harder.”

“Alma doesn’t want to see you.”

“Roxanne?”

“Alma doesn’t want her to see you. She’s afraid of Mike, of losing the boys …”

“I should have known,” Allen said. “What an incredible, healthy bitch she is!”

“I don’t like her,” Joseph said.

“Well, no, you never have. I do.”

“Even now?”

“Particularly now—she’s being vintage Alma,” Allen said. “I’m just sorry I’m being excluded from watching the show.”

“Roxanne minds.”

“Tell her she can’t afford to,” Allen said in short dismissal. “None of us can.”

It was a relief to be alone, to have his obligations of friendship limited to Joseph and his family. Oh, eventually Allen would have to deal with acquaintances, but they all were of the sort to be as glad to delay meetings as he was, if not for the same reasons. Allen did not know whether he had to pull himself apart or pull himself together, and he had to be alone to find out.

Sinking down gradually through layers of shock, guilt, and grief, at bottom what Allen stood on was anger, an emotion far too expensive and dangerous for him ever to have reached it before. But now he was alone. If he made a mistake, he could damage only himself. At first it was like a huge machine, far too heavy and violent for Allen to master as a weapon against anyone but himself. Every muscle in his body ached, and he tried to hold himself in his own arms, whimpering for comfort. Before he could more than catch his breath, it was his anger he was embracing, and the whimper turned to a roar—at Pierre for leaving him, at himself for his cosmic carelessness for his own and Pierre’s safety, at the world determined to teach them to kill themselves, the humane and inexpensive alternative to castration or capital punishment.

Sometimes he tried to defuse it, calling himself a closet romantic full of melodramatic unreason, a self-indulgent escape from the cool cynic he had trained himself to be, but, when he tried to retreat to that old security, there was no room in it for Pierre to be dead. Pierre could lie dead in Allen’s heart only when it expanded with anger. Gradually, instead of being debilitated by it, Allen was learning new strength to master and use it to some purpose. He was going to have revenge, of what sort he didn’t yet know. He only understood that at the deepest level he rejected Pierre’s death as punishment. Pierre had to be seen as a martyr in a war that had been going on for centuries because only one side admitted to fighting.

For an hour at a time, Allen could do simple things with his hands like cooking and washing dishes. When the shaking began, he clamped his hands into his armpits and waited, saying, “You’re not frightened or ashamed or embarrassed. You’re angry.”

He had been at home a week when Carlotta telephoned.

“I want to intrude,” she said. “I want to do your portrait.”

“I want to buy Pierre’s,” Allen said.

“I’ve told you, Allen, I’m not selling any of them.”

“Not even now?”

“Particularly not now.”

“Could I just … have it?”

“No,” Carlotta said.

She came over, somberly dressed for her own sort of mourning.

“With no funeral,” she said, “with no memorial service, we have to do something. At least you should wear a black armband.”

“I’m thinking of wearing the gun that killed him strapped to my heart.”

“Marvelous!” Carlotta exclaimed. “It’s so grossly Freudian.”

“But basically practical,” Allen said. “I’m thinking of killing some people.”

“Who?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, I’ll paint you as a potential murderer.”

“What do you want me to wear?”

“The gun, a white shirt.” Carlotta studied him. “Do you remember saying I should do a Dorian Gray portrait?”

“No,” Allen said.

“So that it could age and you wouldn’t.”

“And bear my corruption so that I could hide it,” Allen said. “What a cooperative bunch we’ve mostly been. “You know, I’m beginning to be angry with Pierre.”

“It isn’t corruption,” Carlotta said. “It isn’t anger either.”

“What is it?”

“Age,” Carlotta said, “the bones beginning their long quarrel with the flesh.”

“How old am I?”

“Thirty-four,” Carlotta said. “We all are.”

“I don’t look it.”

“No, you don’t,” Carlotta said, “but it’s there. I can see it.”

“I have a good face,” Allen said.

“Yes, you do. You’re a good man,” Carlotta said. “A good man with a gun over his heart.”

Allen’s tone, like his hands, could stay steady for as long as an hour, in arrogance or self-mocking, but then it broke in nervous laughter or tears. He agreed to pose no longer than forty-five minutes three times a week. It was the beginning of a new structure. On that slight commitment he would build his week.

A month had passed before Allen realized that there would be no work at all from the sources he depended on. He was going to have to look for it, something he hadn’t done for several years. He was reluctant, rationalized that another month should pass before he did anything himself. He needed the time to steady himself, and the public air needed that time to clear.

Joseph told him about Roxanne’s concert.

“It would do her good to have you there, and there’s nothing Alma could do about it.”

Far from feeling the loss of Roxanne, Allen had been relieved not to see her. She was so bound with Pierre that her presence could be no comfort to him. He was not as sanguine about Alma as he insisted on seeming to Joseph. Allen did understand her—oh, very well. He did not forgive her her lack of loyalty and ingratitude. His decision to attend was based on his anticipation of her discomfort.

Allen, who usually kept his hair very carefully trimmed and not quite short enough to be accused of being military, hadn’t had a haircut since he got home. He wasn’t letting himself go. He showered and shaved with the same regularity every morning, once a week did his laundry, changed his bed. He simply couldn’t face his barber, in body type and manner so like Pierre, who would have heard and would be tender. Allen could cope with Joseph’s sympathy, there was no sexual question in it. And he could deal with Carlotta’s, too, partly because she was so ready to withdraw it if he tried her patience at all. Allen could not risk being with anyone for whom concern could be physically expressed, even with the briefest gesture. It would tear his control like a piece of threadbare cloth. So he combed his hair over instead of behind his ears and knew, though it was common enough among men these days, it gave him an air of decadence he had never approved of. His prudishness was nothing but self-protection, about which he no longer had a choice, except with people who did not know who he was. If he had to present himself to Alma as a child molester, he might as well look the part.

She spoke to him. Moral disapproval could never overcome automatic good manners when Alma was caught off guard. She clearly hadn’t expected him. What a handsome woman she was! Pregnancy was not the only sort of sexual flowering that became a woman. Alma was radiant.

Roxanne, in contrast, was drawn and withdrawn. Allen could hardly bear better than she their short exchange.

“Thank you for being here,” she said.

“I hoped you’d want me to come.”

That was all.

“Hiya,” said Victor. “Long time no see.”

How like his father he was going to be.

Allen caught sight of Tony, squatting over the equipment, a casual guard. He had his mother’s fair coloring, but he didn’t really look like either of his parents. His face was finer, would be sterner, and, though he was now taking his growth, he was not heavy-boned. He was, as he always had been for Allen, absolutely beautiful.

Dale Easter stepped up, blocking Allen’s view.

“I meant to drop you a note.”

Allen nodded. He hadn’t been out enough yet to learn phrases of comfort for friends embarrassed by their own neglect.

“Also to say Alma’s working out very well—first class—just exactly what I needed: brains, taste, inherited jewelry.”

“I’m glad you’re letting Roxanne use your studio.”

“Between us,” Dale said quietly, “she just isn’t Vancouver. She’ll be in Europe next year or the year after. Or she’ll go to L.A. I’ve heard less interesting stuff get top awards at the festivals. She doesn’t even know. It’s eerie.”

“Who’s going to discover her?”

“Someone … soon,” Dale predicted.

He felt about Roxanne much as Allen did himself, and they had the same fostering instinct with her. Tonight Allen wasn’t as sure as he had been that Alma was Roxanne’s personal salvation. Alma would not betray her as Allen had Pierre. Roxanne, in any case, didn’t have Pierre’s extreme and dependent sensibility. What Alma would do was possess and limit. But Roxanne’s need to work was so fundamental she would manage. By Roxanne’s own admission, Alma was marvelous in bed. Perhaps what wore away at Roxanne wasn’t Alma at all but the same grief that fed on Allen’s bones. She had loved Pierre and been close to him in ways forbidden to Allen’s more intense relationship with him. Allen’s grief took a sudden generous step forward, knowing that he shared it, something he had not admitted with Joseph or anyone else.

Victor passed him again in an awkward, crouching run, pursuing Joy, who fled away from him with loud, delighted squeals.

“Oh, dear,” Ann said, following after, “she’ll be part of the show unless I can quiet her down. That Victor!”

Nearly all the strangers were young men as discreetly gay as Dale or Allen. The militants, about whom so much was written, were a small minority even among college kids. They might read The Body Politic or The Advocate, but their own outward and visible sign was to be a little too impeccably heterosexual. Since the raid on The Body Politic, when the police had seized even the newspaper’s subscription list, fewer of the cautious young even subscribed.

Pierre had been nearly the only person Allen knew, aside from the young prostitutes, who had made no attempt to hide his nature or his tastes. It had been one of his deep attractions for Allen, that delicate bravery. Allen found these young men tonight in no way attractive. He resented their presence as trivializing the occasion. They were here the way they’d also be at experimental films or esoteric dance recitals not because they were really interested or knowledgeable but because it was their climate and therefore their source of gossip. He had more respect for drag queens. Flaunting it seemed a more honest defense. Why then didn’t he? He hadn’t the flair or the guts. He was nervous about a wing of hair over his ear.

Allen was suddenly shaking so badly he had to stand against the wall and let the line run over and over in his head: I am not frightened or embarrassed; I’m angry. It was ritual rather than fact. The police could come anytime. Anyone could be dead. But Pierre was dead, so what did it matter? There was the real anger. Allen braced himself on it and smiled, calm enough to hold a camera or a gun, whatever weapon he chose.

“Deciding who to kill must be a little like deciding who to paint,” Carlotta said, “once you make up your mind you’re not going to kill—or paint—yourself.”

“I don’t think I follow you,” Allen said without turning his head; he was a disciplined model, used to shutter speeds.

“Well, it’s perfectly obvious that anyone is important enough to himself to consider suicide, but that’s very subjective—didn’t Auden say something about Narcissus being in love with his own image not because it was beautiful but because it was his? Deciding to kill someone else is different—or maybe it isn’t. I wouldn’t do a portrait of anyone unimportant to me, but you all may be mine to paint simply because you’re mine, there, like the mountain to climb, and you, for instance, are there because of the traffic pattern of Joseph’s nerves. Would it cross your mind to shoot me?”

“Are you serious?” Allen asked.

“Yes. I may in my own way have contributed to Pierre’s suicide.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Some people believe to make an image is to steal a soul.”

“Do you?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be so. The world may basically operate on inadvertent magic.”

“I’d be way ahead of you in soul stealing,” Allen said.

He thought of the drawers and drawers full of negatives. There were a few buildings, gardens, sailboats, but the vast majority were people interred alphabetically.

“But you don’t choose. People are chosen for you … to photograph.”

“Mostly,” Allen agreed.

“I choose—or have the illusion of choosing. Would you, if you killed anyone?”

“Oh, I assume so,” Allen said, “unless it was an accident.”

“Then how would you choose?”

“If not myself?”

“If not yourself.”

“I don’t know,” Allen admitted. “I can’t yet think of anyone who’d be any use to me dead.”

“This is just a pose then?”

Allen looked down at the gun in his hand. “It’s a metaphor.”

“Allen, metaphors don’t kill people. That gun killed Pierre.”

“Pierre killed himself,” Allen said. “I have got that straight finally. This gun is the last thing he touched, the last power he knew.”

And Pierre put it in his mouth, took it like a lover, killed himself, and might as well have castrated Allen with the same bullet, for he would never again as long as he lived aim his desire at other human flesh. It would be easier to kill.

“I don’t think about killing myself any longer,” Carlotta said. “I wonder if I think only one of us is allowed to in the great scheme of things. That would mean Pierre had stolen my soul—or my choice anyway.”

“I don’t either,” Allen said. “I did at first, but only because I really thought I couldn’t stand it; I didn’t ever want to.”

“It’s changed us all. I think it’s cured Joseph.”

“How?”

“Maybe the shock, for one thing. He said to me that going crazy wasn’t a real alternative, and he was damned well going to learn to live with flowers and be Joy’s father. I have a theory about Joseph that his emotional motor was put in upside down, and what ought to drive him crazy keeps him sane; what reassures the rest of us—a tree in bloom, a kid flying a kite—sends him round the bend. Or did.”

“He has no impersonal use for his heart. He says he’s very glad he’s not an artist, but it would have made it easier for him, I think.”

“Not in the long run.”

“No, maybe not,” Allen said.

“Oh, I don’t know. You’re so much more accessible, sympathetic, attractive with the wind out of your sails, but you keep making me want to burst into tears.”

“I strike myself the same way … for different reasons.”

“It isn’t your fault, Allen,” Carlotta called to him across the great gulf of his guilt. “It really isn’t.”

“I wonder why, then, I’m being so cruelly punished,” he said.

His loneliness for Pierre was at times so intense he either wandered the house howling or had to leave, drive around the city, call on a friend. He had nearly given up going to the movies because so often someone tried to pick him up.

All his adult life Allen had envied, while he belittled, men who made nearly no distinction among the requirements of their balls, bowels, and bladders. He had friends who’d as soon offer to buy him a quick one in the hotel men’s room as in the bar.

“Better for you than a drink. Beats a shoeshine around the block …”

It wasn’t conscious fastidiousness or moral disapproval that made Allen refuse. It was the foreknowledge of failure. To his great private chagrin, he had a monogamous cock, and he had years ago given up the embarrassment of trying to prove otherwise. Sometimes he claimed clap, sometimes worldly indifference, sometimes moral superiority to keep sexually aloof. He had never had to confess to Pierre because with Pierre he had no difficulty, nor, perhaps because he was away so much, had Allen ever tired of Pierre sexually.

Since women’s liberation, too much had been said against unequal relationships, which were, after all, one’s first model of love. Allen didn’t care how far kid lib finally went in sexual or financial freedom, children would always be dependent on adults. To accept that dependence was to take the responsibility of being superior, living up to its expectations. It wasn’t a matter of depriving someone else of independence but of accepting his need to depend, to be protected.

Allen had a theory that, if he could have adopted any attractive boy he saw, he would have had no problem with impotence. Pierre, however, was a possessive only child and wouldn’t ever have stood for a rival. That was a generosity Allen could never have taught him.

To wish that Pierre had understood him better was as futile as to wish Pierre was still alive. Allen wished both a hundred times a day, while he also knew there was no way to explain to Pierre what had happened, how it had happened. It was not Allen’s apparent infidelity but his vulnerability that had killed Pierre. If Allen could be picked up, put in jail, exposed in the papers, there was no safety left, not even inside a house with double deadlocks, with a checking account that never went under three thousand dollars. Allen could have tried to explain all that away. He, after all, could bail himself out quickly enough, but Pierre couldn’t have believed him for long as one job after another fell away and no new ones were offered. In such circumstances you don’t stay a man who can bail himself out for long.

Allen liked to believe, because he wanted Pierre to believe, that it was a matter of good taste rather than cowardice that kept Allen from being publicly homosexual. There was something not quite nice, jock vulgar, about the political kisses men gave each other on the covers of radical magazines, and no wonder people were offended. For years Allen had, in fact, been behaving like a common criminal, and he had finally, briefly, been treated like one. He had no more faced the implications than Alma had the night he took her to the jail to bail Roxanne out. It was just beginning to occur to Allen not only that people like Pierre and Roxanne were vulnerable and therefore in need of protection but that he, Allen Dent, could be deprived of his livelihood, locked up.

Was Alma more aware than he of the universal danger? Is that why she had backed away from Roxanne that night and now was avoiding him, genuinely afraid of contagion? Surely she didn’t really believe Allen would try to seduce her sons.

Allen had been at home for two months when he was called on by the police for his first questioning. A teenaged boy had been murdered in Stanley Park on a night Allen was having dinner with the Rabinowitzes. It didn’t take fifteen minutes, and everyone was rigidly polite. The scattered fragments of what had been more often fear than anger fused in the intensity of the encounter. Allen did not have to tell himself that he was in pure rage when they left.

“Because I went to a dinner party where the young waiters were in jockstraps,” he shouted at Carlotta, “I am to be harassed as a child molester, murderer, every time any child reports an incident, every time a body is found in the leaf mold, in the tide? I can’t even stand to read those items in the paper!”

“It’s because of that homosexual murder in Toronto not that many years ago—a boy—do you remember?”

“Of course, I remember. It would make as much sense to harass me about that as it would to harass you every time a good-looking man is murdered since you have been seen having dinner with one occasionally. Flirtation, even overt sexual behavior, isn’t foreplay for murder, even by most of those deranged with guilt—one in half a million maybe.”

“I know it doesn’t make sense,” Carlotta said.

“Do you? How much of a bigot are you, Carlotta?”

“I’ve tried it myself,” she said coolly.

“And found it too normal to be interesting.”

Carlotta laughed. “I think that was Pierre’s turn of phrase, not mine, though I’d like to claim it. I’m a bitch, Allen, but I’m no bigot. I haven’t much sympathy with needs other than my own, and only my own faults interest me.”

“What’s happening to me really doesn’t appall you?”

“No more than what’s happening to everyone else. Melodrama isn’t necessarily more important. You need to be special. You need to be indignant. Be indignant. Be special.”

Allen allowed himself to grind his teeth and then sat in rigid silence while Carlotta worked. After a ten-minute silence he burst into hysterical tears. She took his head in her hands and raked her threatening but very gentle nails through his lengthening hair over and over again. When he was able to catch his breath, she stepped away and left without saying a word. Allen was not sure she would come back, but she did promptly for their next appointment. His relief made him petulant.

“This is going to be a good session,” Carlotta said. “I haven’t seen you look self-indulgent in months. All your expressions used to be inside that range.”

“Has anybody ever simply walked out on a portrait?”

“Mike did,” she said, “but not because he was irritated with me, though he should have been. I was preparing to take my lifetime to finish it, and that was something he didn’t have in mind at all. He really didn’t take to being my muse. It was enough of a disaster to make me wonder if the feminists are right: the muse has to be female. So I tried Roxanne. I don’t think she’s capable of being a disaster.”

“You’re not feminine enough to be a lesbian easily,” Allen said, taunting and serious.

She regarded him with amusement.

“Well, I’m glad you’re entertained,” he said.

Finally Allen did trust Carlotta’s nearness and self-absorption. Because of them, she was not afraid to try to save his life. She wouldn’t spend more on it than she could afford. He didn’t have to be afraid for her as he was sometimes for Joseph, though Allen was far more careful of Joseph. Allen did not talk about guns or killing people in front of Joseph, or about the police.

He ate often at Joseph’s table, and, aside from quite often bringing a roast, good cheeses, wine, bags of cookies, Allen took a great many pictures of Ann and the children as a way to be grateful. Though he still had a very up and down time with Susan and Rachel, Joy had decided to take physical possession of him, climbing about him as she did her father, who visibly winced, as Allen did, when a small assertive shoe landed like an avenging angel in his totally innocent lap. How old did girl children have to be before they became respecters of male anatomy? Surely the bulk of sex crimes involving children and adults could be laid at the feet of two-year-olds. Joy seemed to Allen already very feminine, with her mother’s roundness and small, full mouth. But she had Joseph’s eyes and queer, little laugh.

“Ann,” Allen asked one evening while he was helping her with the dishes and Joseph was putting Joy to bed, “do you ever see John’s face in Rachel or Susan?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, her tone easy enough so that he knew it wasn’t an inadvertently cruel question, “and not just in their faces—the way their bodies move, their gestures. Just the other day, the way Susan looked up—it could have been her father.”

“Is that … hard?”

“Oh, no, Allen. It’s wonderful. I can remember him young and well.”

Allen didn’t imagine he could stand seeing anything of Pierre in someone else, even a small child. An eyebrow would seem grand larceny. But Pierre had been young … and well.

It was to Ann Allen confessed his growing financial concern.

“Oh, I could last for a year, and after that I could sell the house. I bought it for Pierre.”

“You should take pictures of children,” Ann said. “You’re so very good at it.”

Allen laughed. Ann’s kindness was often preposterous. Didn’t she remember that someone like Alma wouldn’t let Allen into the house?

“Let me tell you something about Alma,” Ann said, as if she’d read his thoughts. “She thinks she can protect herself. She has to get over that.”

“Do you see much of them?”

“Not now. I saw Alma when she was alone, when I was alone. Sometimes she was a little overwhelming, but I do like her. She’s honest—maybe partly because she thinks it’s her due; she can afford it. Joseph doesn’t really like her.”

“Do you find Alma and Carlotta both very self-centered … for women?”

Ann laughed. “You men always do want us to be better than we are.”

“Don’t you want men to be better than they are?”

“Rather less good and happier,” Ann said.

Happier? They-lived-happily-ever-after was a heterosexual goal which Allen had always read as what a man was expected to do for a woman, as sex was something he did to her. Happiness for Allen himself was very much beside the point, and part of his love for Pierre, his need to protect, was that happiness was so far out of Pierre’s range except as it is surprised in transient moments of pleasure which can give an illusion of happiness. Allen had never considered that goodness and happiness were natural enemies; quite to the contrary, perfect goodness and perfect happiness were synonymous. But they were states irrelevant to Allen or Pierre.

Joseph no longer walked with the obsessive regularity he had in the days when he and Allen had first met, but at least once a week he suggested Allen go with him along the winter beach or through the bleak scrub of the university grant lands. On these walks Allen got into the habit of asking questions: “What was it like when you sat for Carlotta?” or “Do you think, as Ann seems to, that goodness and happiness are at odds?” Sometimes it seemed to Allen, in the rhythm of that walking, they were not in dialogue so much as in duet, now one carrying the melody, now the other, a theme introduced by one, developed by the other. He often felt more instrument of an idea than its source. There was a detachment he could not reach with Carlotta because there was never a moment when conversation might not turn into contest. And so he could ask, “Is there always a battle between the sexes even when there’s no sex?”

“Ann and I don’t fight,” Joseph said.

“Did you with Carlotta?”

“No, not really. I often felt Carlotta was very impatient with me, but I didn’t take it personally. I decided she had to be irritable the way she had to be cold while she was working.”

“I don’t know why Mike was her great love,” Allen said.

“He’s very attractive to women.”

“He’s very attractive, period. But he’s … unconvincing. Women don’t seem to notice that so much, or they don’t mind.”

“He’s a touching man.”

“Surely not to Carlotta!” Allen was sometimes shocked by Joseph’s tenderness.

“No. I wonder why what is most appealing about people is so often overlooked or misjudged. Mike’s being unconvincing redeemed him for me.”

“It embarrasses me,” Allen said, and heard the irritation in his voice.

Joseph, however, was not challenging, always only offering what was true for himself. For an hour, sometimes two, Allen could be nearly deprived of his grief even while he turned some of its themes into this long duet.

But much of what Allen had to deal with couldn’t be debated while he modeled or sang in the open air. His obsession with Pierre’s body, which had been shocked out of him at its cremation, returned first in dreams, sexually explicit without arousing Allen. He would wake in tears, his body aching as if he had flu or had fallen down a flight of stairs. At night, sitting in front of a television program he couldn’t watch, he would see instead Pierre in all his sexual guises, and Allen was as sexually unmoved as he was with any stranger. Sometimes it seemed to Allen his body’s angry revenge against Pierre’s terrible desertion, but in his mind he couldn’t be angry with Pierre. He wept for Pierre’s fear, horror, sense of betrayal, alone in a house Allen now knew could be as much a jail as it was a safe haven. And wasn’t safe. Why did he have to betray Pierre again now in feeling nothing, nothing at all?

He should go away. He should look for work. He should sell the house. He sat. His hair grew.

“I’ve come to give you a haircut,” Roxanne said, standing at the door with a black satchel, halfway between doctor’s bag and salesman’s sample case.

“Alma doesn’t want you here.”

“Alma’s in Arizona,” Roxanne said.

“For Christmas?”

“Yes. She thought a family Christmas would be nice for the boys, and she’s tired of the rain.”

Allen realized that she was trying not to look around, not to look down at the floor. The last time she had been in this room she had broken in and found Pierre lying dead on the floor. Joseph had let Allen work through his own morbidity, tracing the body’s position on the rug, knowing what of the head had been torn away repeating every nauseating detail until Allen could see it himself though he had not been able to look, in fact, at the dead body at the morgue. Roxanne, like Joseph, had seen. Her exorcising would be of a different order, and Allen could never ask her about it, though he could see it in the vulnerability of her attentiveness.

“I’m not sure Carlotta would approve of a haircut. She’s not finished.”

“She asked me to,” Roxanne said. “Not short—shorter. She says physically we all have one thing in common: we all have amazing hair.”

“Joseph?”

“Well, his is peculiar.”

“Have you seen him lately?” Allen asked. “He’s so much better.”

“No, I haven’t seen anyone really except Carlotta this morning and now you.”

“You look as if you’d taken up Carlotta’s fasting,” Allen said, trying for a flippancy of tone he’d apparently lost; he simply sounded concerned.

“I eat,” Roxanne said. “I don’t sleep well. I get tired.”

“I should be offering you something,” Allen said. “People who live alone develop very bad manners.”

She asked for a glass of milk and followed him out into the kitchen.

“Is Alma staying with Mike?” Allen asked.

“As far as I know,” Roxanne said. “She wasn’t specific, and I didn’t ask.”

“That surprises me.”

“Alma’s a surprising woman,” Roxanne said without irony.

“To me she’s usually overpredictable,” Allen said. “I’ve been hurt by her but not surprised.”

Roxanne nodded. “Were you surprised at me?”

“To be honest, I didn’t think much about you. I was glad at first not to have to see you. You were too close … Just now, when I opened the door and saw you, I was going to say, ‘Pierre isn’t home.’ Still.”

“You look sort of awful … not the hair. Actually I like that, except it makes you look like some other kind of person.”

“What kind?” Allen asked, throwing his head back in a gesture he had learned from his hair.

“More of a brave fool. Carlotta says you’re carrying a gun and talking about killing people.”

“Did she send you over here to be some sort of Delilah?” Allen asked.

“I don’t think so. She says Joseph says you aren’t serious because you haven’t mentioned it to him; you’re putting her on.”

“If I kill anyone, I won’t kill anyone we know,” Allen said. “Not even Alma.”

“She’s frightened of all the wrong things.”

“I understand that,” Allen said. “So have I been. I still am. So much for self-knowledge. Roxanne, are you going to leave her?”

“She’ll probably leave me,” Roxanne said. “She may have already.”

“I can’t see her being that kind of fool.”

“You’re not that much alike,” Roxanne said. “Let me give you the haircut.”

Nor was she, after all, much like Pierre, though they could wear the same shirts. It suddenly occurred to Allen that he should have offered Roxanne some of Pierre’s clothes. Well, he might have thought of it if she’d been around. Unisex was a fad, not a fact. No woman, no matter how deprived of flesh, could have the leanness that made Pierre so fragile and elegant. The flattest female chest promised swelling, the flattest belly a potential birth bubble. Roxanne, so thin she was nearly a stick figure, brought to mind images of stiff toys. She was, like other small women Allen had known, heavy on her feet, and he had seen more boys than girls with her head of sandy mist. Still, her body was, by its nature, amorphous. How well Allen had understood Joseph’s confession that he was reluctant to father a child, not just because of the child but because of the awful transformation that took place for Ann.

“I haven’t told Carlotta that I didn’t get my hair cut because I couldn’t face my barber. I could have gone to someone else, I suppose.”

“You’ve got to get something to do,” Roxanne said, “or find somebody willing to worry about you on a domestic level.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the way I keep house.”

“You’re not keeping heart,” Roxanne said.

“Isn’t that what’s the matter with you?” Allen asked gently.

She sat down at the kitchen table, put aside her scissors and comb, and neither looked at him nor spoke for a moment.

“It seems important,” she said then with slow difficulty, “to keep heart—and so nearly impossible. It must be that much harder for you with Pierre already dead. If we can’t really care, it’s just too awful.”

“Yes,” Allen said, “there’s limited energy for what’s left to do: figure out whether you’re dying of grief or shame or anger.”

“I want to be happy,” Roxanne said.

“Is that word part of some new feminist plot?”

“I doubt it,” Roxanne said.

“Roxanne, anything outside our own hands is out of reach.”

“But it’s not outside my own reach,” Roxanne protested. “I’m happy when I’m working. I’m happy when I’m with the boys and Alma.”

“She’s left you,” Allen said.

Roxanne stood up again and went back to cutting Allen’s hair. Allen felt like a drowning man, clutching at Roxanne’s buoyant desire, which, since it wasn’t strong enough to save him, he dragged down into his own despair. He could not have her bobbing there, a decoy to the great lie.

“Pierre was never happy,” he said.

“Of course, he was,” Roxanne said impatiently. “Whenever you were home, he was very happy.”

Allen moved suddenly out of Roxanne’s range and shouted, “My work made it necessary for me to travel!”

“Sit down. Stop yelling. I didn’t come over here to fight with you. I came over to give you a haircut.”

“I wonder if Joseph ever got to feeling the way I do now, sick of the institutional kindness.”

She had left the wings of hair over his ears, and by now, used to the greater length of it, he felt protected rather than exposed.

“I ponder growing a beard,” he said, inspecting her job and himself in the bathroom mirror.

He hadn’t. He had contemplated lying on his bed and letting hair grow as if he were a corpse until years later he’d be discovered entirely blanketed with hair, his own final curtain.

Roxanne came every day through the holiday. Allen had declined Christmas with the Rabinowitzes; so had Roxanne. Carlotta seemed to disappear to undisclosed relatives somewhere in the interior.

Roxanne didn’t ask Allen to Alma’s house, obviously because that was what it was. Left behind alone, Roxanne became caretaker. Instead, she brought the meal to him, basically duck and wild rice, but it was the trash of Christmas that was her real contribution, broken candy canes, defective paper bells, a Santa on skis who kept falling over, a music box that played the first three notes of “Silent Night” and then groaned like a fly in a trap. She had dozens of things, all collected from the wreckage of Christmas Eve at her drugstore.

“Can you imagine? Nobody else wanted any of it. Nobody seems to have kids any more, or the kids mustn’t have anything but the best.”

At first Allen only sat to watch what Roxanne took out of bag or box and played at being mock alarmed or offended by whatever she set out on table or sill, hung about the room at random, but then he became intrigued with a plastic drummer who was supposed to drum as he was pulled along and didn’t.

“He’s not broken. He’s just out of line,” he said, and in a moment the drummer gave a smart report.

Lots was beyond fixing.

“The Liberty Bell is cracked,” Roxanne said. “Why should a Christmas bell with just a bashed-in corner be rejected?”

“What’s the matter with this hand puppet?”

“Turn it around; some kid put gum in its hair. I can cut that out.”

“Best barber in town,” Allen said.

When they left the living room to sit down to dinner, it looked as if half a dozen children had been called away from play.

“What are we going to do with it all?” Allen asked.

“Give it to the children’s wing of the hospital or the Salvation Army.”

“What kinds of Christmases did you have as a child?” Allen asked.

“Different kinds, lots of different kinds. Maybe that’s partly where I got the idea that we ought to be happy because, when people make an effort, that’s really all they want.”

“Are you absurd enough to tell me you’ve been trying to make me happy?”

“I guess so,” she said. “Anyway, I am.”

Did he have to be humble if he couldn’t be haughty in his grief? Allen had rarely been given anything that really pleased him. Even when he was given what he’d expressly asked for, he found fault with it. The blue of the sweater wasn’t the exact blue he had in mind. He wanted the paperback rather than the hardback of Lawren Harris; the hardback was too much a coffee table book. He had never wanted to be given anything for the house; the house was Pierre’s, to be given to by Allen. He had been that way since he could remember. He had been afraid not so much of being bought as of being changed by what other people wanted for him.

“Do you have any family left?” Roxanne asked.

“No, no one close. I never knew my father. He left my mother before I was two. Mother died—oh, about a year before Pierre came to live with me.”

“What was she like?”

“She had that kind of cold, prim prettiness women develop who’ve been badly treated by men. She was intelligent; she was ambitious for me.”

“How did she raise you?”

“Her parents helped at first. Then she was a librarian. We didn’t really like each other. There was a sort of wary gratitude between us, but once I was grown, I think she was afraid I might dive into her blouse again or mount her. And she kept buying me things like rifles and stories about the sea. Once she bought me a dog. I made her take it back the next day. I’ve never been able to stand extravagance unless there’s money to pay for it.”

“Where did you live?”

“Surrey—British Columbia’s Orange County, without the money. I expect some of our old neighbors are responsible for the trash mail that’s come in in the last several months. They’ve even got morality and the last judgment down to comic-book formula. Have you ever seen any of it?”

“No,” Roxanne said.

“At first I threw it away. Then it began to amuse me.” Allen got up and went to his desk, opened a drawer, and found three objects that looked like books of raffle tickets. “Take a look.”

They were titled things like “This Was Your Life” and “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Each page was one strip high and two frames long; all ended in the flames of hell.

“Nobody who sends this stuff ever signs a name. I wonder why righteousness needs to be anonymous.”

“Because you have a gun,” Roxanne said. “They believe in evil.”

“Well, perhaps that’s as well,” Allen said. “I believe in justice enough not to shoot anyone I lived next door to as a child simply on spec.”

“Pierre kept talking about killing himself or your killing yourself, and then he did. Now you’re talking about killing other people.”

“I don’t know how else to say how murderously angry I am,” Allen said quietly. “That’s all.”

“Why don’t you come out?” Roxanne said.

“Come out? Where do you think I’ve been since I was arrested? I haven’t been offered a job since. How out can you get?”

“But I mean, say something about it. Make a political point.”

“For what? Some of your silly little gay rags that are read by twenty-five people who advertise for each other’s cocks every month?”

“There’s something I want to say—there is no point in my defending gay politics—but there’s something both you and Alma are very mixed up about. You can be superior to people like Pierre and me, that’s fine, but you can’t be superior to yourself. You’re as much a cock-sucker as anyone in the want ads. You’re as much a fairy and as much a victim. If even Pierre’s killing himself isn’t enough to jar you loose, maybe nothing is.”

“Loose from what?”

“Your worship of the straight world. Your hatred of your own.”

“It’s not a world. It’s a street scene.”

“Alma’s coming home tomorrow,” Roxanne said.

“You get tired of an argument awfully quickly,” Allen said. “Well, anyway, I won that one. Alma’s coming home.”

After Roxanne had gone, Allen paced against the offense she had been to him. Though he had, at one time or another, called himself every ugly sexual name there was, no one else had ever dared to. Allen had not put himself in that kind of sordid situation where he could be degraded. Even his first sexual experience had been with a teacher who was sensitive, guilty, but never vulgar. Yet that little cunt he’d more or less fished out of the gutter, who didn’t have the loyalty to call on him unless that bitch Alma was out of town, felt free to call him a cock-sucker, a fairy, a victim!

He slammed his fist into his palm and said aloud, “I am a man!”

Then he found himself laughing, not on the edge of lunacy but in relief. It was exactly what he had to say not only to himself but to the world, in Weekend, The Canadian, Saturday Night, and Maclean’s.

It did not occur to Allen that, once he made up his mind to make a full statement, no one would want it.

“That sort of thing went out in the sixties with Paul Goodman and his crowd, didn’t it?” one editor asked.

“A quiet sort of confession, maybe,” another began dubiously, “but stuff about not finding work, about suicide—well, excuse me, but that self-pity and melodrama are just what the rest of us are pretty tired of. It may sound unfeeling, but it’s like we know old people ache; we don’t want to go on hearing about it.”

“Allen, look, we haven’t dropped you, damn it! You’ve dropped us. You haven’t been here in months, and you know, the grapevine did let us know maybe you needed to take a holiday. Toronto isn’t a hick town, what do you think? There’s plenty of work. I’d have given you this article on the asbestos strike except I assigned it just this morning.”

“Take my advice,” said yet another, who had been spared the raid because he had been home with the flu. “Just let it keep blowing over. Take an assignment here and there—turn them down, too, if they’re at all, you know—and in six months, a year, you’ll be right back where you were. I can’t begin; you can see that, but once other people do, I promise you …”

It was to this man Allen, who had been ironic and polite with all the others, shouted, “Do you know how many queens and cock-suckers like you are in this business and therefore can’t help me out?”

“I have a fair idea,” came the cool answer.

“Maybe it’s time people had a specific idea,” Allen said.

“I wouldn’t get into that if I were you. Contrary to a lot of arguments you hear, the police are very cooperative about blackmailers.”

“I wouldn’t dream of blackmailing you,” Allen said. “I was just thinking about some sort of billboard, maybe called ‘The Queens of Industry.’ There might be a series of them: ‘Fairies in Politics,’ ‘Cock-suckers in the Civil Service,’ ‘Queers in Communication and Education.’ Just for everyone’s information, because there may be some people being screwed who don’t know it or don’t know why.”

Not only office doors but also private doors in Toronto began to close on him. At the sound of Allen’s voice, the apartment intercoms went dead, and no buzz followed for building doors to open. By the end of two weeks there wasn’t anyone in Toronto media willing to talk with him, and none of the assignments suggested or promised had come through.

An old acquaintance, taken too much to drink to be careful enough about anyone or anything, admonished Allen, “There’s screwing and screwing, Allen, old man, and you’re into the wrong kind.”

At the end of the third week, Allen walked into the office of The Body Politic, and there sat the men who were willing to kiss each other in public to make a political point. They had in common with college professors, which one or two of them seemed to be, a wardrobe not required to grow up and leave home. They had the clean, tumble-dry look of students, eyes young and grave above misleading beards. Allen might have been only a few years older than some of them; he felt like their grandmother, dry cleaned, clean-shaven, eyes rheumy with accustomed grief.

“No, sorry,” was the answer there. “We bully the shit out of people to come out, but we don’t witch-hunt our own.”

Flicked by their quiet tone of superiority, Allen said, “You know, this magazine is nothing but a larger closet—it doesn’t even get into the real world.”

“All you guys are the same. Anything under half a million circulation isn’t real. The fourteen thousand people who take The Body Politic read it, cover to cover.”

“Of course, they do,” Allen said. “You’re preaching to the converted.”

“Listen, brother,” another said, “if this is a closet, it’s your closet, don’t shit in it. If you want to break out, don’t kill your fellow prisoners; shoot the guards.”

“What I’m telling you is,” Allen shouted in desperation, “the guards are faggots! The cops are faggots; the editors are faggots!”

Somebody took him out for a drink and talked about sociological paranoia, grief-related pathology, the health of collective living and working.

“I don’t really think you understand what’s happening to me,” Allen said finally very quietly.

He had never before really cared what he was asked to do; some assignments had been more interesting than others, some humanly or technically challenging. Since his first year of learning to use a camera, he had not been interested in choosing what he photographed. He simply wanted to be the very best in how it was done. Now Allen had his own subject, and no one, not even these young radicals, dared deal with it. No one would allow his revenge to be news, Very well. He would turn it into art.

Allen had for years been the trusted photographer at gatherings where discretion nearly always was overcome by vanity and sentiment. Even the most vulnerable of men—politicians—have need of recklessness, and Allen’s collection of compromised men included Cabinet ministers as well as university presidents, doctors, and other tycoons. It had been a source of great amusement to many of them that the man who had done their most nobly exposed public faces, the portraits that inspired the nation, also had photographed their private pleasures. Allen Dent was, of course, to be absolutely trusted. He was one of them, and he did not have as much to lose only because he did not have as much.

The revolutionaries dreamed impossibilities: if tomorrow every homosexual in the country suddenly turned green (or lavender), social attitudes would have to change. Well, Allen had offered to do nearly that single-handed, and no one would let him, as censored by The Body Politic as by Weekend.

Allen returned to Vancouver inspired.

“Any work?” Joseph asked him.

“Not a thing,” Allen answered so cheerfully Joseph looked alarmed. “I decided something when I was back there. I decided that begging to be put back to work when I don’t even need that kind of money is crazy. I’m missing the opportunity of my life. I should be putting together a show of my own, an Allen Dent retrospective. I think even Dale would be interested in it.”

“A great idea!” Joseph said.

“I need time, and I’ve got it. I think it could be sent right across the country, and, once I get that sort of attention, a really good press, I can more or less go back to work at what I want anytime …”

Like Roxanne, Allen needed wall space, but a great deal more of it. He stripped the walls of his house of the mirrors and hangings he had bought gradually over the years for Pierre. Then he had to repaint, and it took three coats of white to cover Pierre’s taste for dark gold. Having that long chore to do gave Allen the time he needed to think before he actually settled to going through his files.

He had no intention of using any of the incriminating material he had in the retrospective. Those pictures would be used only as the basis for selecting the portraits he would hang. Among them he could also use his portrait of Auden, reading with the Russians, one of Allen’s first assignments to take not only a great but secretly deeply cherished face; of Isherwood, recently enough to be a gay activist; of Ginsberg; of Kate Millett. He could also include portraits of his friends: Alma, Roxanne, Carlotta (Pierre would say she hardly counted), Dale Easter. And Pierre, of course, would be the refrain. There would be portrait after portrait of Pierre. This show would be Pierre’s memorial as well as Allen’s revenge. And he did not have to say anything, even start the rumor. To anyone at all aware, the principle of selection would be obvious, and the show would be the talk of Canada without a newspaper’s or magazine’s ever mentioning the testimony it was.

“When are you going to finish?” Allen asked Carlotta. “I’m awfully busy with my own work, and I’m tired of this gun.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m tired of your face. Another week.”

He did not tell her he had discovered he’d already shot his enemies. Now all he had to do was hang them.

Enemies?

“Yes, every damned one of them, down to Pierre himself. This was a memorial to betrayal.

Carlotta finished her work. Joseph called round less often. Ann occasionally dropped by with a casserole or a cake.

“I know you’re working hard. I don’t want to interrupt. I just don’t want you to forget to eat.”

Joy toddled around the living room, where enlargements of various faces had already been put up. She stopped in front of the marvelous ruin of folding flesh Auden’s face had become, pointed, and said, “Lady.”

“No …” Ann began.

“Don’t correct her,” Allen said. “It’s a marvelously androgynous face.”

When Joy pointed to a languorous Pierre and said, “Girl,” Ann blushed.

“He would have loved that,” Allen said. “It would have pleased him absolutely.”

“Will there be any children?” Ann asked.

“No,” he said. “None.”

Tony Trasco’s face, gravely young and inquiring, was immediately dismissed from Allen’s mind. There would be no wishful thinking in this show. Behind each portrait there must be one indisputable fact: homosexual experience. Those famous and self-confessed should be placed strategically near those famous and closeted. Where he had a choice, Allen selected the more formal, the more serious, the more respectable, except in the photographs of Pierre, who would flaunt through this crowd, exposing them all.

“Well, since I don’t do photography,” Dale said, “it wouldn’t set a precedent, and I think a retrospective a marvelous idea.”

“I’d like to take it right across the country this spring, summer, and fall, travel with it,” Allen said.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there. I don’t even have a Toronto contact. All my business is in the States and Europe. I’d be glad to see what I can do in L.A. or Houston or New York.”

“No,” Allen said, “I want this one to stay Canadian.”

It did not take him long to locate galleries in all the major cities. A couple of phone calls to Ottawa made it clear that there was Canada Council money available for Allen and for the galleries, if they applied, to help finance the project. There could even be a catalogue.

“Once you’re doing the right thing,” Allen said to Joseph, “everything just seems to fall into place. Before I leave here, I’ll put the house on the market. That will give me money if I need it … and freedom. I’m going to have a good look around this country and see whether there’s someplace else to go.”

Allen began to go out again in the evening, to chamber music, to the theater. He could still attract the smiles of unattached young women, but he also now stirred gossiping ripples across the clusters of respectable men, the chartered accountants, university teachers, doctors, several of whom would hang in the show, all of whom could. Allen wished he had done more working and playing in Vancouver just for the purpose of this show. Still, he had done enough so that no one in the city would be in any doubt. All this crowd would go to the opening—oh, yes, surely. They’d be delighted to pay homage to this elusive darling, who now, because slightly tarnished, was more attractive than ever.

Allen was excited. Sometimes, as he hung a new print, he laughed aloud in satisfaction. The pictures of Pierre, which at first he wasn’t sure he could stand, seeing that future/past of Pierre’s blown away head in every whole angle, began to feel companionable. In fact, Allen could sometimes even talk with him.

“You’d say this isn’t a very nice thing to do,” to a face of Pierre with a shadow of beard, the kind of photograph Pierre would have destroyed if he’d had a chance. “I know that. It isn’t. If you were alive, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t have to.”

One of his mother’s favorite expressions to stop him from a course of action dangerous or distasteful to her had been, “Well, it’s your funeral.”

It was Pierre’s funeral. He had, as another stupid old saying went, asked for it.

It was not until the night before the opening, when he and Dale finished hanging the last photograph, that Allen felt the real impact of what he had done. It was Pierre’s resurrection among illustrious, if preponderantly guilty, witnesses, his Pierre: young, ambiguous, enticing, who had shot himself in the enormous silence Allen had re-created here, in sorrow, in revenge.

“This is—ah—very good stuff,” Dale said, moving restlessly about the room. “I wonder only about—how shall I put it? Since it is my gallery, I wouldn’t want people to think that my vanity had been served …”

“Your photograph stays,” Allen said.

“And Alma’s? I’m not sure …”

“And Alma’s.”

That night Allen couldn’t sleep. Before the next night was over, he would know what he had done or was beginning to do. All his life so self-protective, so circumspect, it was an entirely new experience to be apprehensive about failing to be exposed. People must see, see and explain to each other, until the news traveled out before the show, preparing audiences all across the country. The catalogue, simply titled “Allen Dent: A Retrospective,” gave the name, title, occupation, and place of residence of every person photographed, except for Pierre. “Pierre” was the only identification of his pictures, ten of them.

It was noon when Alma arrived at the door, larger than life, as she had often seemed.

“You’ve put on weight again,” Allen said, smiling at her, not inviting her in.

“You have got to take my picture out of that show,” Alma said.

“Whatever for?” Allen asked. “It’s a lovely picture.”

“Do you really think you’re going to get away with it? Do you really think all those important people are going to let you do that to them? Screwing children may be too apolitical an offense to put you behind bars, but this isn’t. This is libel. This is slander. I’ll sue.”

“For what?” Allen asked, all bewildered innocence.

“You bastard!”

It was a heady pleasure, seeing Alma as angry and as helpless as she was.

“Regretting your friends often only makes it worse,” he said, his voice teacherly as it had often been with Alma in the past, to no effect obviously.

“Those pictures of Pierre—they’re just ludicrous. You know that. You’re making a fool of yourself is what you’re doing.”

“A small price for the pleasure,” Allen assured her.

“What do you think you’re trying to prove anyway?” she demanded, genuine bewilderment modestly undermining her anger.

“I’m not trying to prove anything,” Allen said. “You work in a gallery. You know art isn’t propaganda. Its pretensions are quite different. They’re concerned with truth, if I recall the gist of my fine arts elective.”

“Don’t you care who you hurt?”

“No,” Allen said, smiling, “not one bit. Surely you, of all people, can understand that.”

She looked as if she might strike him, restrained herself because of the deep lesson she had learned from Mike, no doubt, who had never been taught you didn’t hit back.

“Allen, I would probably be a very different person if I didn’t have children. As a mother, I’m asking you to take my picture out of your show.”

“Pierre is my even better excuse for inhumane behavior, and he’s dead.”

“Exactly! Tony and Victor are very much alive …”

“And therefore as unsafe as you and I are.”

“You’re a sick man,” Alma said. “You have to be stopped. You will be stopped.”

She hesitated, obviously wondering if there was any angle she’d neglected. Then she turned away.

In the late afternoon Alma’s father telephoned.

“Allen, I hear there’s a picture of Alma in your retrospective.”

“That’s right.”

“She seems awfully upset about it, and I wonder if there’s any way to have it removed from the show. I’d be very glad to buy it for whatever amount seemed reasonable to you … for the inconvenience to you as well.”

“It’s not for sale,” Allen said. “It’s not a selling show.”

“I see. Well, perhaps simply for removing it.”

“It can’t be done, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, surely anything can be done. We’re reasonable men.”

“No, I’m not,” Allen said.

“But you’ve been a friend of Alma’s. There’s no reason why you’d want to threaten her reputation in any way. She feels she’s in rather inappropriate company …”

“On the contrary, the whole show is a monument to pretension and hypocrisy. She should feel right at home.”

“I hadn’t taken you for a man who would make enemies foolishly.”

Allen whistled the melody for the line “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” knowing Alma’s father would not pick up the clue.

“Well, I’ll have to see what else can be done.”

Allen was elated. There was nothing anyone could do.

The next phone call came at 6:00 P.M. It was Dale Easter.

“The gallery’s just been closed by the fire department,” he said. “I never did intend to have real shows here; I didn’t even check out the regulations.”

“But they can’t do that!” Allen protested. “Not just like that with no warning. Who sent them?”

“I suppose, when I applied for the party license, the liquor board notified them …”

“Alma’s father has done this.”

“Allen, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to fight it. I thought at first Alma was being paranoid, but she isn’t, is she?”

“About what?”

“About what this show really is. It’s hot enough to burn my place down without any fire, never mind the exits.”

“Damn it, Dale, it will put you on the Canadian map!”

“All-star to bush league. Who needs it?”

“If I can’t get this show to the public …”

“You may in another six months get back to what you ought to be doing. Do you think I would have agreed if I’d realized what you’re up to? Do you think any of the other galleries would go along? Use your head.”

“You won’t show it.”

“No, Allen, I won’t.”

“If Alma hadn’t said anything, you’d have been none the wiser.”

“Until after opening night. A lot of our acquaintances would be very amused at how badly I failed Canadian identity tests. There I was, saying to Alma, ‘I not only didn’t know he was gay; I didn’t know he’d ever been a Cabinet minister; I didn’t even know his name!’ She’s invaluable to me, that woman.”

“If I took you and Alma out of it?”

“No way,” Dale said. “Just no way.”

Allen stood, shaking with frustration. His mind moved from hanging the show in his own house to kidnapping Tony. Nothing that occurred to him would work. The only way he could succeed with this show was to call no public attention to it, and that, in Vancouver, was now impossible. The question was whether or not he could get it out of town and into Edmonton without interference. If he could once get a gallery run of a couple of weeks, he was sure he could keep going. Dale had neither contacts nor interest in stopping him outside town. Alma’s father would not have the influence in other cities he did here.

At just past eight Carlotta turned up. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

“Alma didn’t like her picture in the show. I wouldn’t take it down. So her father had the building closed down.”

“Dale’s not going to stand for that, is he?”

“Even if Dale offers you his gallery for a show, don’t accept,” Allen said. “He just doesn’t have the feel for things Canadian, you know?”

“But he was so enthusiastic about it. What’s really going on? What kind of a game are you and Alma playing?”

“It’s called ‘Fighting for Your Life,’” Allen said.

“Are you going to give it to the papers?”

“No,” Allen said. “I’m not going to do anything. In two weeks I’ll get it to Edmonton, and it can start there.”

“But this is your town. Before I’d let Alma’s father shut me down, he’d hear about it first thing on ‘Good Morning Radio,’ second thing in the Province for breakfast, and throughout the day. How can you let him run you out of town?”

“It doesn’t much matter to me here, to tell the truth. This is really a Toronto show taking its time about getting there.”

“You know, that’s the trouble with you continental types. You don’t recognize home ground even when you’re ankle deep in it. Vancouver needs this show, Allen. You can’t let it be shut down—not even by a bunch of red-necks, for God’s sake, but by a crazy personal friend.”

“By now Alma means more to me than that. She’s closer to being my wicked fairy godmother.”

“Well, since I’m all dressed up with no place to go, and it’s your fault, perhaps you should take me somewhere for a drink.”

“You are looking very elegant,” Allen admitted, “but I’d just as soon not meet other people on the prowl because the show didn’t open. I don’t want to have to explain.”

“Well, I do,” she said, gathering a great web of black shawl around her.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Allen said, hoping the mildness of his request would be more effective than a more dramatic command.

The item in the following evening’s Sun said simply, “It was doubly disappointing last night when the fire department closed the King Gallery. This was the first time its owner, Dale Easter, had agreed to show not only a Canadian but a local artist’s work. Allen Dent, who has an international reputation as a photographer, had mounted a fifteen-year retrospective, which will now not be shown in Vancouver at all but open in Edmonton in two weeks. Dale Easter has no plans for other shows and therefore is not interested in going to the expense of complying with fire regulations. Vancouver art lovers have missed their one opportunity to see the King Gallery as well as the work of one of our most well-known native sons. Allen Dent was born in Surrey …”

From there on it read like an obituary, which seemed appropriate enough. There was nothing, Allen was relieved to see, that suggested motives more complex than safety. If rumors had begun to circulate, they were nebulous enough for the media to ignore. By the time the public had actually been exposed to the show, rumors would be too specific for the media to do anything but censor them.

Most of the world was, after all, like Joseph, for less salutary reasons. It didn’t occur to Joseph to question the fire department’s action, though he lamented it. What Allen needed in the cities ahead of him were several more Almas with no personal investment in closing the show down but with enough perception to recognize what he was doing and enough malice to report what they knew at the right cocktail parties.

Allen had cleaned out the house of everything but furniture the real estate agent said would be helpful to sell it, and he had arranged for that to be stored as soon as the house was sold. He was packing a generous couple of suitcases to take to Edmonton and on across the country when Roxanne arrived.

“I came to say goodbye,” she explained, and when Allen expressed neither gratitude nor admiration for her courage in coming to see him, she added, “because I’m leaving Vancouver.”

“Going south with the migration this time?”

“No,” she said, “I’m going alone.”

“Then there is a straw that breaks the camel’s back? By now I could as easily believe in the Easter bunny.”

“I don’t agree with Alma about a lot of things, too many, I guess, but I wish she could have figured out how to burn down as well as shut down that show.”

“You?” Allen asked, incredulous.

“Yes, me. It’s a terrible thing you’re doing.”

“Justice can’t always be good-looking,” Allen said, liking the cynical flippancy of tone that had gradually come back to him.

“If what you’re doing is just, then what the police did to you in Toronto was merciful.”

“That’s certainly Alma’s view.”

“No, it isn’t. She hasn’t got a view, really. She’s too frightened and guilty and self-righteous to think, and so are you.”

“On the contrary,” Allen assured her, “I’ve thought very carefully. It was you who suggested I make a political statement in the first place. This is my political statement.”

“What’s political about betraying your own people?”

“Some of us require betrayal to see the light … like me. I’m doing unto others what’s been done to me.”

“You really are too much, you people,” Roxanne said, shaking her head. “Where do you get the crust to be so sure you can get even and have the right to?”

“I’m nothing more than poor white trash from Surrey you know,” Allen said. “I still don’t have to grovel.”

“Don’t knock your mother. She raised you. If she was still alive, if Pierre was still alive, you wouldn’t be doing this.”

“Of course not. It took me awhile to see that I was without obligation and could do what I think is right.”

“It’s not right! It’s what you want to do to get even. It won’t work.”

“How do you know?” Allen demanded. “What could you know? You’re not just innocent of the real world; you’re stupid about it. You should go out and do some dealing with it before you come here telling me what to do. You, who betray all your friends, neglect your work to be not even Alma’s lover so much as her housemaid, babysitter, caretaker, who gets paid in bed privileges rather than cash, because Alma’s tighter with her purse than her cunt—you come here to teach me what’s right?”

“Something horrible seems to be happening to all of us,” Roxanne cried. “You used to be a person I trusted.”

“I could have said the same about you.”

“But you understand what I was trying to do, don’t you? You understand I was only trying to love her.”

“Of course, I understood. You understand me now. We just don’t approve of each other.”

“I am your friend, Allen.”

“Where are you going … anywhere in particular?”

“Dale keeps telling me about L.A. and San Diego, and I know some women who’ve gone down there.”

“What did make you decide?”

Roxanne hesitated, then shrugged. “Since she hasn’t told me, I guess technically … oh, what difference does it make? She’s pregnant.”

“Pregnant?”

“That’s right.”

“That woman does nothing by halves!”

“Or everything,” Roxanne said wryly. “Anyway, you probably ought to take her out of the show, for credibility, if nothing else.”

“Not on your life!” Allen said. “She stays.”

“Why? Why does it matter to you so much?” Roxanne asked.

“It’s a beautiful show, Roxanne, with perfect moral balance, perfect ambiguity: funeral and resurrection, betrayal and tribute, vengeance and justice. I’m obliged to nothing else now … surely not the likes of Alma. Why should you be pleading for her even now on your way out?”

“I love her,” Roxanne said.

“Love excuses far too much.”

Allen looked at her thoughtfully—the toy he’d found in a record shop and brought home to Pierre, another joke turned into a friendship by its victim because she was so attentive and detached. The people closest to Allen shared an indifference to being seen as foolish, unlike himself or Alma, so endlessly and vainly self-protective.

“I’ll send you a postcard somewhere along the way,” Roxanne said.

“I hope you never come back,” Allen said.

“I hope your show burns down in Edmonton,” she said.

They caught each other in an awkward, hard embrace, each the size but blatantly wrong sex of the other’s lover. For a moment after Roxanne left, Allen wondered if they both were being blind, but he quickly decided he, at any rate, was not. Allen might have settled for the negative solution Roxanne would be for him, but Roxanne had a different kind of future. She went south, her attention intact. Allen left for Edmonton, an artist at last, without the grace to be amazed that he could have been driven to it.