4

BARRY STERN felt awful about it. Teddy's keys were like a big blob in his side pocket, weighing him down, bearing witness to his deception. It was, he knew, a desperate act. In fact, everything he did lately was a desperate act, and everything he thought about was even more desperate.

How was it possible that everything had gone sour in less than a year? Sitting in the anteroom of Glover's Real Estate in Hicksville, Long Island, he pretended to be reading a trade magazine, Home-building. The words of the articles did not enter his consciousness. Three strikes and you're out, he thought, trying to find a sliver of humor in his predicament.

Nothing helped. He was merely sleepwalking through his days, trying to keep up the pretense of normalcy by going through the ritual of what was really his former life. Six months ago he had a real estate business, buying and selling modest-price homes in Queens, the homes of working men and women.

Then suddenly it was all over. Nobody was buying because of the recession, and nobody was selling, hoping that good times were just around the corner. It didn't look to Barry like there would be good times ever again. There was no point in paying rent and salaries to employees. Staying afloat was impossible. His only alternative was to close down. He wondered if it had been his fault. Other small real estate companies had survived. Not many. The reality was that despite his illusions, he had always been a marginal player without financial depth, living far above his means.

Four years ago he had his peak year and had grossed three hundred thousand dollars. It was fat city then, and he'd thought it was going to last forever. That was the year they were able to move out of the apartment in Astoria and get that brownstone apartment in Manhattan and register Teddy in private school. Not bad for a guy who barely finished high school and whose father never made more than ten thousand a year working behind the counter of an appetizer store.

That was also the year he bought his parents that condo in West Palm Beach for $23,900, not exactly the height of luxury, but perfect for his folks, who thought they had arrived at Nirvana. At least he hadn't leveraged it, and they owned it free and clear and could manage on their Social Security. They could make it no matter what happened to him.

Even now, especially now, as he sat in the anteroom of Tom Glover's office, he could not chase the idea that his only way out of this mess was to cause something to happen to him, something deliberate. Removing such an idea from his thoughts was becoming more and more of a chore. What might be saving him from taking such an action, however unspecified, was the fact that he had borrowed heavily on his one-hundred-thousand-dollar whole-life insurance policy and Sally would net only about half. But even half was becoming more and more of an attraction as he sank deeper and deeper into the mud of depression.

The irony was that if ever there was a time to have cash, this was it. The deals were a dime a dozen. All kinds of sweet deals were being made now by people with cash. Hell, if he had cash now, he could make a quick fortune. Buildings were for sale at a steal.

He hadn't even told Sally and Teddy that the business had failed completely or that he had closed the office and fired his two employees. Kaput! So much for the American dream. At least they had Sally's salary, $27,000 gross, which was enough for the bare necessities, although considering her health problems there was no telling how long that might last.

That, too, had been a burst from the blue, Sally getting a heart attack two years ago. He had thought heart attacks were a male thing. Well, he knew better now. She was going downhill, too, with the doctors suggesting a heart transplant rather than a bypass, which was scary considering the odds. That, too, had become a catch-22. She had to keep working to be eligible for the company health plan, but the continued working wasn't doing her heart any good. At this point she didn't have the option of quitting.

In a way, he supposed, they were lucky that they had only one kid. When Teddy was born, they had vowed that they would give him all the advantages they hadn't had, the best education, the best environment, all the things children of poor parents wanted for their offspring.

This fucking recession had ruined everything. He felt the anger swell inside of him. Don't do that, he cautioned himself, not before this interview with Tom Glover, with whom he had had dealings when he was in business, which seemed ages ago. That much he knew about salesmanship. It was like show business. If you brought any downer baggage to the presentation, it was sure to queer the deal.

Queer the deal! There was no way to escape the inescapable. Teddy was about to become, or had become, a homosexual. Barry wasn't dead certain, of course. Maybe it was his imagination. But the kid showed no interest in girls. He had seen him in heavy conversation with those two who lived in the ground-floor apartment. At first he had thought nothing of it. Then when it was repeated he had actually warned him about getting too close to their kind, but obviously it hadn't made a dent. Perhaps he should have been more diplomatic in the way he approached it.

He had told Teddy to steer clear of those men on the grounds that they were fairies. He had used that word as a weapon, along with "fag," "fruit," "queer," "three-dollar bill," and other such terms of opprobrium, not that he had anything against how they lived and what they did. He just didn't want his son to become one of them.

He had also raised the specter of AIDS, which was frightening as hell. Of course he had exaggerated the possibilities of transmission, and Teddy had accused him of being hysterical, reeling off various statistical information that he had probably gotten from the boys downstairs. If Teddy ever got AIDS, he was dead certain that would clinch the deal that was floating ominously in his head. There would be absolutely no point in going on.

Yet he hadn't the guts to confront Teddy with the ultimate question, fearing that his answer would be affirmative. That would be an unacceptable blow to him and to Sally, from whom he hid the knowledge of his suspicion.

But all his venom-laden warnings and scare tactics apparently had made no difference to Teddy. That had been confirmed the day before yesterday. Barry had tried to keep up appearances that he was still running his business and had been coming home at his usual time. But on that day he was feeling so lousy he decided to go home early, maybe take a long nap.

Coming down the street, he had actually seen Teddy open the door of that downstairs apartment with a key and let himself in. What was going on here? It curdled his stomach just to recall it. For an hour he'd debated with himself about confronting Teddy in the apartment, but he was so damned depressed, he wasn't looking to find yet another nail for his coffin.

He went to the movies instead but could hardly concentrate on the story. The prospect of Teddy being one of them gave rise to a lot of heavy thinking on his part. It was not something he wanted to talk about with Sally. No sense aggravating her about it. Being homosexual was something that happened to other people, not his only child. Coping with it was far out of his frame of reference. Such a possibility was not even remotely included in those traditional dreams of fatherhood, where the son somehow picks up the relay stick from the old man and keeps sprouting branches on the family tree.

He wondered how other fathers—and mothers—dealt with it. He was all for everybody having equal rights and hadn't considered himself a homophobe. "Live and let live" had always been his motto. He had nothing at all against them, and he was totally supportive of their right not to be harassed, to be left alone to live their lives in peace. All right, they were different. Some people were left-handed, some right. So what!

But his own kid being a fag didn't square with his hopes and dreams for Teddy. Toleration was bullshit on this issue. He loved his son, loved him fiercely, deeply, but somehow, despite all the politicizing of the issue, all the good public relations for gay people, all the rationalizing that this was only a matter of sexual choice, which was supposed to be no big deal, Teddy being a homosexual seemed worse than his being a criminal. It was pretty awful to think that, but he couldn't help himself. At the very least, he had to be honest with himself. He hadn't raised his son to suck dicks and take it up the ass. God, the images that floated through his mind. He hated them, hated the idea of it, hated his intolerance, but mostly he hated that such a thing could happen to his only son. And to him.

Of course, he assured himself, he would learn to be accepting. What else was there to do? He could not disown his own child. Never that. But it would never be the same. A foreigner would always be there where his son once stood. He'd have to bear the pain of his broken heart, keep it hidden from his son and paste a smile on his face. Could he really do that? He wasn't sure.

Not that he was dead certain that Teddy was one, and at first it seemed harmless for the boy to be friendly with them. Teddy liked animals, and had wanted a cat, but Sally was allergic to both cats and dogs, and that finished that. Now, along with all the other gloomy shit, this thing with Teddy stood on top of his agenda, along with going broke.

What the hell had happened to his street smarts over the years? He had grown soft, he supposed. Or maybe he was being punished for past actions, which had a logical ring to it. Once he'd had absolutely no conscience in the way he bought and sold. He could rationalize any shady deal. Well, they weren't really shady, just sharp. Buy low, as low as you could get and for as little cash as possible. Then sell high, as high as you could get. Wasn't that the American way?

He had been damned good at blockbusting, scaring the shit out of the Jews, Greeks, and Italians that the blacks were coming in. Start a panic. Buy low. Then sell to the blacks at inflated prices. Even that was long over. People got wise. Besides, the market was saturated. All right, it was shameful. So now they were paying him back, and he deserved what he got.

Somewhere down the line he had lost the stomach for it. Perhaps that was his downfall, this development of a conscience. One day he had awakened with scruples. Perhaps he had looked at Teddy and said to himself that this was no legacy to leave one's kid, the memory that his father was nothing more than a street hustler.

Now what he needed most was to recover some of those qualities they used to call moxie. Once he had had moxie.

There was good moxie and bad moxie. Bad moxie would have given him the balls to do outrageous things, like blackmail. There was an idea that had blasted into his head the day he saw and recognized Jack Springer, the junior senator from the great state of New York, sneaking up the stairs to the second-floor apartment of Myrna L. Davis.

The man was wearing sunglasses and a hat pulled low over his face, and he had a mustache, which Barry knew was a phony after he'd taken a look at a picture of the senator in the papers. Problem was the man had a prominent clefted chin that gave him away. He would have done better with a beard. Would make a damned good tip for the tabloids, he knew. Those supermarket rags loved stories about self-righteous politicians dipping their wick in strange places. He wondered how much the tip would be worth to them. In desperation, he thought, a man could rationalize anything, however sleazy. God, here he was sinking again, taking the low road.

He had passed Myrna Davis a number of times in the hall, offering the usual neighborly noncommittal smile. He wasn't much at mixing with the neighbors. Never did you much good. Besides, who wanted them to know your business? Especially now. He knew that Myrna was an editor at Vanity Fair. Mid-thirties. Cute. Good legs. Snotty look. But then he had caught sight of a familiar face skulking up the stairs to Myrna Davis's apartment. It had taken him weeks to figure it out.

The guy would hole up with her all weekend, arrive at odd hours, leave at odd hours. Shacking up. That was no secret. They never left the apartment all weekend, sending for carryout two, three times a day.

The real secret was who the man was. Barry recognized him from a big picture of him on the front page of the New York Daily News. It showed him along with his wife and children on the occasion of his announcement that he was going to run for a third term. He figured that this business with Myrna Davis had been going on for nearly six months when he saw that picture in the paper. Fucking hypocrite.

Actually, he never told Sally about it. He wasn't sure why, except maybe he did have this larcenous thought in his mind. Here was this family-man, big-shot senator, spending his weekends shacked up with their neighbor. No wonder they didn't go out. Wouldn't do much for the family-man image. Lately it had crossed his mind that that kind of information might be worth something, a great deal, maybe. To the senator. To the senator's opposition. To the media.

We're talking here of survival, he tried to tell himself. But that kind of an act would put him in that whole other place, the hole he had climbed out of. That wasn't good moxie. That was blackmail, beyond the pale, with the risk of being charged and put away. Then again, desperation was a great motivator. Certainly it pushed his imagination to great flights of fancy.

Even to robbery. Hell, he had Teddy's key to the apartment downstairs. He could simply walk in and take whatever was quickly convertible to cash. Maybe he'd even find some cash, lots of cash. But that idea quickly sank out of sight. That woman on the first floor, Burns. She had a bird's-eye view of the stairs leading to the apartment. Once he had seen her watching him as he came up the front steps. Of course, he could wait until she was gone on some errand, then make his move.

No, he decided. Desperation was making him crazy. Besides, it was never a good policy to shit where you ate, which brought his thoughts back to Teddy once again.

This thing with Teddy was devastating. He could remember the pink little bundle of flesh he had seen through the maternity-ward window and how proud he was to show everyone who passed that this was his kid. He also remembered how much he had fantasized about what his boy would become and how he, Barry Stern, would dedicate himself to building a great financial base so that his kid wouldn't want for anything.

Watching little Teddy in that maternity-ward window, he was absolutely convinced that this child would amount to something really important, something impressive and wonderful, a person famous throughout the world. He could remember very clearly thinking such thoughts, thoughts that crystallized into a father's dream. He was certain that all fathers felt like that. Yet nowhere in this equation had the idea of homosexuality even entered his mind. His son, a queer?

Not that he didn't love Teddy with all his heart and soul, but the idea that he would live a life as a kind of exile and, in some circles, even an object of ridicule and defamation was depressing. His son, having sex with other men, with no possibilities of children, a loving wife, a normal life, was, well, face it, pissing on his dream. It wasn't fair.

Perhaps he was just overreacting to the idea, based on only circumstantial evidence. All optimism had faded. He was on the mat, broke, over his head in debt, on the verge of eviction, his wife ailing and working beyond her strength, his son a possible homosexual. Clearly, even now, he was better off dead than alive, although he was not comfortable with the idea of being a cop-out.

All this horror pulsed through his mind as he waited for Glover to see him, hoping and praying that Glover would provide him with an opportunity of financial recovery. So far he hadn't been successful in hooking up with another real estate outfit that might be willing to pay an advance. They were all in deep shit. But Glover had stuck it out all those years making a market in Levitt's houses in Hicksville, and in the good years Barry had thrown a lot of business his way.

Once he got a little financial breathing space, he could direct his attention to Teddy and Sally with a clear mind. It could be that he was just reading things into Teddy's odd conduct. It was a brief flash of optimism, but intruding on it was the memory of what he had done about Teddy's keys.

Stealing Teddy's keys was a shabby act of which he was greatly ashamed. But he couldn't think of any other way to keep him away from the two queers, acting on the idea that the way people became homosexuals was by being turned on by other homosexuals. He could not bring himself to believe that people were born that way. How, then, did it come about? Older men seducing younger ones, making them like it so much that they could renounce women altogether. He wondered if it was too late.

"Barry Stern," Glover called from his office. "Come on in. Sorry to keep you waiting. Have a cigar."

It was an old-fashioned way to welcome someone into his office, and in an effort to keep the mood, Barry took one of the cigars from the humidor and allowed Glover to light it for him. Glover relit his own stub of cigar, then the two settled back on their chairs and studied each other.

Glover was a short man who wore his pants high, nearly up to his chest. When he was sitting, his feet barely reached the floor. His eyes were set back deep in his face, giving him a hawklike appearance despite his thick, moist lips.

"It stinks," Glover said. "They fucked us real estate guys good."

"Better believe," Barry said. "Not that we haven't been through this before. But this one is for the books. Nobody's buying. Nobody's selling. The S and L's are fucked. The banks are on the balls of their asses."

He looked around the room. Outside, he could see the rows and rows of Mr. Levitt's ingenious idea for the American family, now individualized, as if the owners were determined to mock Mr. Levitt's method of mass-producing the American dream of home ownership.

"Maybe it was a blind fluke," Glover said. "But this place turns over. Not as much as I'd like these days, but I think I can get through it."

"Paid to specialize, Tom," Barry said. "Here you got a following."

"Forty years in the making, Barry," Glover said.

"I'm a helluva salesman, Tom," Barry said, hoping he did not sound as if he were gilding the lily.

"That you are, Barry," Glover said.

"I sent people your way."

There it was, Barry thought, the reminder. Pulling on the guilt chain.

"And you never screwed me."

Barry was encouraged by Glover's response. "That's very important to me, Tom," he said, seeing the opening. "My reputation is everything." He took a deep puff of the cigar, too deep. He was growing nauseated. He was not a cigar smoker. Sweat began to creep down his back. It put a damper on his salesmanship.

"I know what you mean."

"I'd like you to put me on," Barry said, watching Glover's face. The man's eyes had drifted away, and he was inhaling and blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth.

"Long trip in from Manhattan every day," Glover said.

"Oh, I'd move. Get an apartment somewhere out here. I need this, Tom." It felt as if desperation were flowing out of every pore of him along with the perspiration.

"Worth considering, Barry," Glover said.

"You don't know how grateful I'd be," Barry said, suddenly finding the courage to put the cigar down on the glass ashtray. The nausea was still there, but the sudden optimism had a calming effect on his guts.

"It's slim pickings, though," Glover said in a cautionary way, as if he had noticed the effect his consent had had on Barry.

"Tom, I promise you I'll sell the shit out of this place."

"I know you will, Barry. That's why I'm taking you on."

"A couple a thousand a month will tide me over until the commissions roll in. Maybe sixty, ninety days at the most." Barry felt oddly relieved. There it was. Out in the open, and his throat hadn't tightened.

Glover shifted his weight on his chair and puffed deeply, this time blowing the smoke directly in front of him, enveloping Barry until it dissipated.

"Wish I could, Barry," Glover said. "Unfortunately the phrase cash flow doesn't exist in this business anymore. But, hell, there won't be any grass growing under your feet, Barry. I'd say ninety days max you could be pulling down two, three thou a month."

Barry felt his stomach churn. "I'm tapped out, Tom," he mumbled, his eyes watching his restless hands as they massaged his thighs. "If two thou is too much, say one thou and more if the sales roll in."

"Nothing rolls in anymore, Barry. There's only two salesmen able to make a living on this turf now. This bullshit about the recession being over is just that. I got a feeling that the real estate boom is gone with the wind for you and me, Barry. I'm sorry. But no advances."

"Sure, Tom, I understand." Barry stood up. His head was spinning, and the feeling of nausea had surged back. He managed to put out his hand. Glover took it, pumped.

"I wish I could, Barry. You know that," Glover said.

"Sure, Tom," Barry said, forcing himself to be pleasant in the time-honored way of salesmen who hadn't sold their wares on the first pitch. It was the rule of the game never to burn your bridges. He managed to make his smile last until he got to the anteroom.

He held on to his nausea until he reached the station platform, then he threw up in one of the litter cans. In the midst of his retching he had the sensation that the process was ridding his being of the last vestige of hope.