I was channel surfing in the Sea of Happiness. Except for Big Helen, I was alone in the hotel bar, nursing a Bloody Caesar. I munched disconsolately on the celery stick and thought, the more you try to bite out of life, the more fibrous strands you’re likely to get caught in your teeth. The remote was like a prosthesis, appended to my wrist, switching stations in time with my pulse. The war, a soap opera, the weather channel, more talk about the war, snow, a sitcom rerun, more war, more snow, country singers whose mothers don’t know they’re lesbians, heroes of the war. Big Helen put my sandwich on the table.
“You want malaise with that, baby?”
“Malaise. I don’t need malaise. My God, woman, look out the window,” I said, pointing. “It’s all around us.”
“Baby, I said mayonnaise. And that ain’t no window, that’s a TV.”
I came to my senses and sure enough, I was waving the remote at the wall screen television.
“Sorry.”
“You better settle on what you want. You gonna wear that thing out.”
I laughed self-consciously. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. Got a toothpick, Helen?”
“Sure, baby.”
She handed me a red plastic toothpick in the shape of a swordfish and plunked down a clean ashtray. Concord Hotel, it said, in lettering that made me think of zoot suits, swing music, and victory in Europe.
“Thanks.”
“Uh-huh.”
I’d come here looking for happiness. When did I turn into a spectator, confusing what I saw with what I felt?
Monsieur Delacroix and I arrived the day after the war ended. We had both lost our jobs, taken our separation pay, borrowed Monsieur Delacroix’s sister’s convertible, and driven the long drive to Chicago. When we crossed the border at Detroit, there were yellow ribbons on all the cars on the highway. Except ours. At truck stops, on turnpikes, at gas stations, in all the towns, big yellow bows welcomed home the troops. Just past Gary, Indiana, Monsieur stuck in the Judy Garland tape. “Chicago!” she belted out as the silhouette of its tall skyscrapers came into view on the horizon. For a split second I thought I saw a huge yellow bow tied to the very tip of the top of the Sears Tower. It was a trick of the light. Out came the sun, a gold-plated knife cutting through the platinum winter clouds. We laughed, rolled down the rooftop to let the icy wind whip our hair, and took the first exit downtown. No one noticed. Safe, at last.
Big Helen took my empty glass, wedging her large hips between tables. She brushed against my cigarette. Ashes flew.
“Gee, Helen, sorry.”
“Saw’right, baby. Saw’right.”
Big Helen — that was how she introduced herself the first time we walked into her bar — had taken a real shine to me and Monsieur Delacroix. And we to her.
“You boys are … different. Where you from?”
“Toronto,” we said together. “Canada,” I added.
“Oh, honey, I know where Toronto is. Hear it’s a lot like Chicago.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a lot like Chicago.”
Big Helen’s stacked bracelets rattled as she put down our drinks. She navigated the bar escorted by an armada of eye-popping accessories. Declarative rings. Demonstrative necklaces. Defiant earrings. Jewellery circumnavigated the shorelines of her body, bobbing and swaying as it lapped against collar, cuffs, and the contour of hemlines. Her bijoux were beacons in the dimly lit cocktail lounge. Anchored in darkness, they suddenly floated to the surface, twinkling briefly as she passed beneath tiny pot lights in the ceiling. Their lustre seemed to emanate from somewhere deep in time and far away in space. I imagined them breaking free and forming galaxies.
She flipped back her dreads and waved a finger when I tried to pay for our drinks.
“On the house, baby. I need to build me a better clientele. I don’t have enough people of refinement coming here yet. I need to create a buzz.” She said “refinement” in a snooty, old Hollywood movie voice. “I’m workin’ it, though. If you know what I mean.”
We did. And she was right. No one worked it like Big Helen.
Monsieur Delacroix and I had been here some time. We planned to stay till the money ran out. We liked it here. And what was there to go back to? A life of crime? No one had work anymore.
The big TV screen reminded me of Monsieur’s Theory of Elevators, which had been going over and over in my head since I sat down.
Wide awake, after stumbling in from the bars at four a.m. our first night on the lam, I couldn’t sleep. Monsieur Delacroix sawed logs, clear-cutting his way through giant redwoods.
In the drawer of the bedside table, I found the usual Gideon and a book in Korean that seemed to be something Buddhist. Left behind, no doubt, by one of the many pay-by-the-week Korean students staying here to learn English. We’d run into a couple earlier on the elevator. I’d experienced my usual moment of doubt but hid my fear of heights from Monsieur. He thought I was ridiculous. Technology of any application lifted his spirits, particularly if it also lifted Monsieur Delacroix. Especially if it made him higher than a kite. He lived for the moment, worshiping machines and motion. Monsieur Delacroix treated life like an adventure movie, munching popcorn through its ups and downs.
The students had chips and Coke from the lobby vending machines. A break in their homework, I guessed. I stood in one corner. Monsieur stood in the other corner on the same side. Each student took a remaining corner. They were very nice to us. We smiled and said hello to each other.
“Tourist?”
“Yes.”
“American?”
“No, Canadian. Toronto.”
“Ah, like America!”
“Yes, like America.”
We stood at opposite sides of the elevator, smiling.
“Nice night.”
“You have a nice night too.”
The elevator door closed. Monsieur Delacroix turned to me. His mouth lemon-sucked itself into a tightness of concentration.
“Have I ever explained my Theory of Elevators?”
“Your what?”
“My Theory of Elevators, dear.”
“Wait,” I said. “My notebook.”
We got inside our room, and each cracked open a beer. Monsieur kicked off his black-and-white-checkered sneakers and sat down on his bed. On the opposite bed, I lotus-positioned and cozily lap-topped.
“In an elevator, if there are two people, they will form a perfect line,” Monsieur Delacroix announced, playing absently with a strand of hair. “One will stand against the left wall, and one will stand against the right wall. If there are three people, they will form a perfect triangle. One at both the right and the left wall, standing away from the door, and one right in front of the door as close to it as he can get. If there are four people, you have a perfect square, as you witnessed. Each will take his own corner. If there are five, all corners will be taken, and there will be one right in the centre, so you have a possibility of lines, triangles, and squares.”
“Lines, triangles, and squares — oh my!” I said. “What if you’re by yourself?”
“You’re free to stand where you wish, but you’ll try to abuse the privilege. You’ll nonchalantly lean against one wall, then the next. You’ll cross your legs, fold your arms, maybe even close your eyes. You’ll turn the light off, and then back on. You’ll fiddle with the fan. You’ll carve your name into a wall. You might even carve some pornography if you’re interesting. You’ll contemplate Emergency Stop. But …”
“But?”
“But! Your freedom is an illusion. No man can bear to go up and down alone. When you share the elevator, you worry … What to say? Where to look? How to cover up a smell? You worry about the spread of germs, and what another’s cough means. But when you are alone, nagging away at the back of your head, you start to think to yourself … you begin to worry … what if the cables snap?”
Monsieur Delacroix helped himself to another beer and let out a self-satisfied sigh.
“Now it’s time for our facial,” he said. And got out the Aloe Vera Five-Minute Masks.
I wondered if he was right, that people trapped in a box can’t form a circle and join each other. What about the guy I’d met?
“Wannanother?”
Big Helen’s large bosom was inches away from my face. She smelled of salt and citrus.
“Sure. Thanks.”
A serial killer famous for stashing the body parts of twenty-five victims in the pipes underneath his house was giving an exclusive interview. He said he wished he could turn back the clock. A revered newscaster, known for hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners reportage, furrowed his brow and asked the serial killer if he regretted what he did. No, he replied, he just wanted to turn back the clock. Then he said, “Regret what?”
“Same? Hot?” Big Helen segued her heft through the flip-top counter and reached for a glass. She had her paws on the Tabasco. I jumped in before it was too late.
“A little less this time,” I said. “But you’re starting to get it. Don’t be shy with the celery salt though.”
First time I ordered a Bloody Caesar, Big Helen drew a blank.
“You mean a Bloody Mary.”
“No. A Caesar. With Clamato not tomato juice. It’s practically Canada’s national cocktail.”
“I don’t know ’bout that. I just can’t wrap my head round putting clams in your juice.” She put the drink on a fresh napkin that had a picture of a hula girl on it.
“Where’s Mr. Delacroix today?”
“Monsieur Delacroix hasn’t come home yet.”
“He’s bad. Good bad. But bad.”
Big Helen laughed. She went behind the bar and started to cut up limes for the late-afternoon crowd. I changed channels to a game show.
I felt cables snapping all around me.
“The meat people are buried in Graceland,” he said.
We were on the El, grinding toward downtown from the night before. He to school, me to my digs. He pointed out the window as we clattered over a graveyard straight out of Charles Dickens. Unwieldy tombstones and crooked memorials loomed among leafless trees sprouting in brown grass. Blue sky cheated through breaks in a thin skin of filmy clouds.
“The Smiths, the Oscar Meyers, they’re all buried in Graceland Cemetery,” he said.
We rattled over the bones of meatpacking and the remains of railways. A cemetery with a life of its own.
“You can get a tour.”
Why didn’t he just tell me? I had all the clues. They followed him around like breadcrumbs. He avoided the topic even though what I knew about him — everything in his apartment, what he ate, how he made love — broke his scam and made me hurt for him even more. I loved an out-of-step con artist. I wanted to tell him I knew. I wanted to tell him so I could break down. That he wasn’t a criminal. That he wasn’t alone. The only person he was conning was himself. If he needed a fall guy, I was it. I could write myself into his story if he gave me the opening lines. It was his gambit.
“You can get a tour?” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic.
“Yeah.” He dimpled in a boyish smile and glanced at me.
His innocent face belied the instinct of a felon. He was unable to sit still, his knee was up and down, all over the damn place. I could show him how to hold on to stillness if he let me. His books were loose on the seat beside him: Environmental Studies. I took his hand and squeezed it, long enough for the suit across the aisle to rustle his paper and give us a dirty look. He blushed and withdrew his hand. I took it back, and he let it stay. He sighed.
“But only in the summer,” he said. He said “summer” as though it were a distant place, somewhere he’d never visited. “I’ve never taken the tour,” he added.
“What about the gangsters?” I asked, as Graceland receded into the narrow end of perspective’s funnel. If anyone knew, he would.
“Huh?”
“You know. Al Capone. The Roaring Twenties. The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. The stuff Chicago is famous for.” I’d been looking around for monuments to the criminals who gave Chicago its glamour. My snooping for some history of the crimes that made it a great city had not turned up any leads. It was perplexing.
“Oh, that.” He looked out the window and curled his lip. “That’s the past. Who cares?” He brushed me off with a wave of his hand, as though he were clearing the air of a bad smell. We lurched into a station. He quickly got up, dropping my hand. I wanted to give him a hug, to tell him. I knew why he wouldn’t let me put my tongue down his throat.
“This is where I have to get off,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “Too bad.”
The suit was staring so I pulled him back down and kissed him right on the lips before he had a chance to stop me like last night. My head filled with jazz. Did the kid hear too?
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered. Dazed, he stumbled to the door. “Tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I said, with a reassuring smile. “Tomorrow.”
I watched his tight little backside merengue off the car. It was touching how he thought he could fool me. He was so young that everything he did was a fingerprint. And I was an expert at detection. The train kicked out onto the trestle. We clattered by repeating brick walls and dark windows, like in a cartoon.
I wanted to know where they buried the gangsters. There must be a museum.
The Sea of Happiness is in the Concord Hotel. The hotel has nothing else in common with the supersonic jet but a name. The speed of sound is irrelevant in the Concord Hotel, if you’re escapees like me and Monsieur Delacroix, trying to outdistance the speed of shame. We were vigilant, looking over our shoulders to make sure shame wasn’t tailgating us like a second-rate detective. So far, we’d been smart and quick, committing crimes and leaving evidence. On purpose. We imagined that shame was stuck at the scene of a felony, smoking a stogie as it scratched its double chin. Clueless, it overlooked the obvious.
The rooms at the Concord Hotel are forty dollars a night for a double with TV. But there’s no cable or converter, just a dial you turn by hand and fuzzy reception. You get two hard beds, a closet with a broken door, red, orange, and yellow striped curtains and bedspreads, a cockroach in the bathroom, and Monsieur Delacroix snoring his head off beside you. The walls are paper thin, so if it isn’t Monsieur keeping you awake, it’s the TV above, people having sex in the next room, or an occasional bout of glittering repartee up and down the hallways.
“Motherfucker!”
“Give it back faggot!”
“Come get it bitch!”
Stuff like that.
The Concord Hotel was built in the 1920s. Mr. Maharaj on the graveyard shift told us. You could tell it was stylish then. A marble lobby in deco lines. Brass rails. There was probably someone to shine your shoes while, fedora doffed, you read your Chicago Tribune.
Nowadays, the marble is cracked, and the brass is tarnished. But there is still life in the Sea of Happiness.
You get to the bar through a doorway in the hotel lobby, past a wall mural of piccolo-playing mermaids, whales with trombones, giant clams propped open like grand pianos with musical notes coming out of the keys in wavy lines, and lobsters with eyes winking at the end of long stalks, playing their claws like castanets, all dancing at the bottom of a Day-Glo ocean. The Sea of Happiness is spelled out in interlocking sea horses. Inside, the ceiling and walls are draped with purple fishing nets encrusted with blue plastic starfish and pieces of pink and yellow coral. There’s a stuffed marlin over the service area. The tables are covered in plexiglass embedded with shells: oysters, periwinkles, sand dollars, conches, nautiluses, butter clams.
“Hey, Canada.”
“Hey,” I replied.
It was the roadie I liked from the Shriner Circus. Part of the reason Monsieur Delacroix and I patronized the Sea of Happiness was the Shriner Circus. The show was in town, and the bar was a hangout for some of the roadies. We were quite taken with two of them. Monsieur Delacroix preferred a mastiff who looked like something from the World Federation of Wrestling, with thick blond Viking hair, and thighs that could bend steel girders. I liked a guy Monsieur Delacroix called Trailer Park. He had a taut, sinewy look, ready to snap. Like he’d been in juvenile detention and learned a few tricks you’d like him to teach you. He had hurtin’ eyes, variegated according to the light, and a tattoo on his right forearm featuring an eagle, an anchor, a trident, and a pistol. “Navy Seals,” he’d explained one night when he saw me staring at it, offering nothing further.
The roadies came filing in and crowded round the bar. They all smiled at me. I was regular now. I smiled back.
“Where’s the French dude?” Trailer Park asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. The roadie winked and gave me thumbs-up, then turned to his big friend. I wasn’t in the mood to talk. I needed to think a bit more, work my way around/through the feelings. I was thinking about the young man I met. He told me about his brother. He never said a thing about how proud he was, though, or what a fine thing his brother had done for his country. There was a scream in his eyes as he told me. All I saw when I looked at the good-looking roadie was that same scream in the form of a smile, coming at me like a fist.
I surfed. Channel after channel, people congratulated themselves on the war. Military strategists were talk-showed into celebrity status. Children got a quick fix of living history, watching the war on TV, with commentary. Right and wrong were being re-established. People had stars in their eyes, and stripes.
“You okay, baby? Another drink?”
“No thanks. Not now, Helen.”
Sometimes I think too much, so I surf. It calms me down, the regular rhythm of waves, as they crash and disappear. To me, the ocean sounds just like the snow on a station after sign-off.
I was having an out-of-body experience at Vortex when I met him. The club had comedy nights on Tuesdays, called America’s Funniest Homo Videos. I perched on a stool against a wall in the video room. It was so dark when I first came in that I couldn’t see a thing except the enormous screen and a bank of monitors hanging from the ceiling. Earlier, on the roomy dance floor in the front of the club, the outgoing Miss Gay Chicago did a show to promote the upcoming coronation of the new Miss Gay Chicago. She lip-synched to several disco standards, accompanied by a chorus of brick shithouses wearing leopard-skin G-strings, and a laser show.
It took a while for my eyes to adjust. They were showing old I Love Lucy segments, Buddy Cole monologues from Kids in the Hall, stuff from Saturday Night Live, Men on Film, The Golden Girls, Joan Rivers, the best Alexis moments from Dynasty, that kind of thing.
When I arrived with Monsieur Delacroix at the beginning of the evening, we went straight to the karaoke bar at the back. Monsieur got up and sang “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.” to me. Everyone stared. First at Monsieur Delacroix, then at me, then back at Monsieur Delacroix. He had a mushroom cloud of blond hair and radiated charisma. On the flip side, he couldn’t sing and was dressed from head to toe in beige. But people love a somebody-done-me-wrong song. They’ll overlook anything for a good cry in their cups, even pitch.
After, we had a drink, then Monsieur Delacroix headed off to the baths. I stayed. Monsieur Delacroix’s taste for anonymous sex verged on the pathological. I used to be like that, but I’d changed. I had become a romantic, looking for picket fences through the poppers. I liked a little mystery, having something more to take off than a white towel. That’s all people wear at the baths as they perambulate through its dusky corridors, searching from cubicle to cubicle for semaphores of invitation, imagining they are free.
A white towel conceals a multitude of crimes. It contributes to the myth of democracy, like McDonald’s. It’s the Big Mac of sex. All we want in life, it seems, is to be quick. You walk into the baths, you remove your clothes, you put on a white towel. You are Everyman going undercover. Sans identity, you are guilty of nothing. No past, no class, no language of your own. Nobody knows who you are or what you’ve done. The discourse of the baths is strict and linear. How could I trust a place that takes the sex out of words, the freedom out of speech? I liked to flirt with my tricks, confuse them with circles of rhetoric, ensnare them with a jazz riff of amorous maybes. But Monsieur Delacroix liked to draw lines. Which was why you’ll find him in his little box, his stomach on a pillow, white rump raised to whoever is interested.
My rocks had been offed at the baths more times than I could count. I had had a good time. A lot of fun. A few laughs. But in exile my tastes had turned to more exotic pursuits. I was on to new things. I was after new blood. The kind the heart pumps. The kind that courses through your brain and lets you make mistakes. I wanted out of all the boxes. All around me, cables were snapping. I wanted to know what someone wore when they were on the outside, see how they deceived the world. A pose is a pose is a pose. In the baths you can pretend to be anyone you want to be. I didn’t care who you wanted to be. I was hungry for who you pretended to be when you were on the outside. In hiding. Then I wanted to strip search you visible with love. Uncover what you did wrong, and then spread you against the fence.
Monsieur Delacroix liked things he can measure, things he can count on. For me, the baths were about the law of averages, and I was ready for a lot more than average.
When my pupils had expanded suitably to survey the crowd, I did a trick scan, hoping my tracking beam of pheromones would collide with another’s, and beautiful music would happen. I was in wide-beam mode that evening.
He made his move.
“Hi,” he said, playing coy to the hilt. A bit awkward though, not very slick.
I stared. He was a babe.
“Hi.”
He was younger than me, dressed like a college kid. Jeans, topsiders, a button-down shirt. An awkward bang of thick auburn hair fell into his eyes. He swept it away with a goofy gesture. His eyes sparkled, big, oval, and bright, bright blue. He had a toothy smile as Midwestern as a cornfield on a clear day. I was smitten. The Gershwin brothers poured a tune in my ears. A sentimental lyric and a haunting refrain oozed through me. Some of it spilled out of my eyes. My brain turned into a cocktail shaker of good spirits. Infatuation and alcohol have the same effect on me as nostalgia. They’re all about forgetting where you are, right now. You feel like you remember something good, only it’s better than it really was.
“Can I buy you a drink?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure. A Coke. I don’t drink.”
“Sure.” I waved over a waiter and ordered a Coke and a beer.
He leaned into me with his pelvis, inserting a leg between mine. He put a hand inside my open jacket, on my chest, right above my heart.
“I’m not usually like this,” he said. “It feels good.”
“Feeling’s mutual,” I replied.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Wow!” he exclaimed. “You don’t look it.”
“Thanks. And you?”
“Twenty,” he said proudly. “I’m in college. You’re not from here, are you?”
“No,” I said as our drinks arrived. “I’m from Canada. Toronto.”
He took a large gulp of his Coke. “I’ve never been there before,” he said. “Everyone says it’s a lot like Europe.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a lot like Europe.”
“Wanna play cops and robbers?” he said.
“Gotta gun?”
“Yeah,” he said, putting my hand on his crotch.
Sometimes you just look at a person and know. It’s too late to get away. But who was chasing whom? Where were the handcuffs?
Big Helen put down a fresh drink.
“From your friend over there,” she said. She didn’t approve. “A boy with your looks could get his pick. You could do better.”
Trailer Park raised his beer at me. I raised my drink at him.
“How’s your wife, sugar,” Big Helen said loud enough for everyone to hear.
He gave her a tight smile. “Fine. Usual. Y’know.”
She narrowed her eyes and said to me through her teeth, “He pockets his ring when he sees you. Don’t go with him. He’s trouble.”
“Thanks. Don’t worry. I won’t.”
Big Helen looked doubtful.
It was after five. The Sea of Happiness was packed. I felt claustrophobic and changed the channel. I watched a commercial for a suburban discount store that sold furniture suites and home entertainment centres. Chicagoland’s finest selection of more things to put in a box.
Monsieur Delacroix and I had been waiting for Mr. Wright. God’s house is in Oak Park. And you can’t move the furniture.
One afternoon, we took the car and sped along the freeway past the tall buildings, past the projects, through the suburbs, out to the quiet land of perfect houses. The studio and home of Frank Lloyd Wright was serene. You can get a tour. A retired schoolteacher, with steely grey hair tied back in a braided ponytail and wearing a tweed skirt-suit, took us and a red-faced cabinetry sales representative from Indianapolis through the hard, tranquil rooms. Monsieur Delacroix had proved forward-thinking by pocketing his tape measure at the last moment. The architect’s paean to right angles pleased him. Or rather, the artifice did.
“There are no consistent, unswerving lines in nature, darling,” he said as he measured corners and crossbeams, recording geometrical conclusions in his scribbler. “Gravity bends light and twists sound. Wind wavers spider silk. We think we’re all standing on solid ground, but we’re not. The horizon curves. We can’t see it, but even seemingly flat terrain is slightly bent.”
“Um, that’s one way of looking at it, I guess,” said our tour guide, turning to me. “Does your friend always talk like this? He’s got quite the way with words.”
“Sometimes his way with words is better when he keeps them to himself,” I replied. I abruptly changed the conversation by pitching a few questions about Mr. Wright’s private life.
The married Mr. Wright had had an affair with another woman, with whom he eventually fled. He left his home and the other homes he’d designed, impeccable boxes you don’t want to sit in for too long. They are low and flat, wide and square. The placement of tables and chairs validates the lines. You can go from one room to another because the lines lead you on, but there are no curves to allow you to stray.
“What’s this table made of?” asked the cabinetry man.
“Walnut,” replied our guide.
“That’s not walnut, that’s oak,” the cabinetry man said accusingly. “What’s this chair made of?”
“Teak.”
“No, it’s not. It’s rowan.”
Monsieur Delacroix rolled his eyes and put his arm around my shoulder.
“He left all this to fuck in Europe,” I said.
“No circles, that’s why,” sighed Monsieur Delacroix, putting away his tape measure. “We should all leave to fuck in Europe.”
“But what about that museum he designed in New York?” I asked. “It’s round.”
“No one lives in a museum, dear. That’s where we bury people.”
Monsieur Delacroix dropped me off downtown where I’d arranged to meet my new friend. He declined my invitation to join us. He was impatient with my affairs of the heart. He told me I was wasting my time. Whose time was I supposed to waste?
He was brooding in front of the public Picasso, a scarf wrapped tightly round his neck to fend off the wind. There again was that perky bum. I was happy to see him. I walked right up to him, and against a swell of saxophone music, with a slight undercurrent of strings, I took him in my arms and pried open his mouth with my lips.
“No,” he said. “Don’t.”
“Yes,” I said. “I must.”
And did.
“But why?”
“Because I know. And I’m not afraid.”
We spent the fading late afternoon walking through streets of the oldest skyscrapers in the city, the Louis Sullivans and others dating to the turn of the twentieth century. Things got high when they started to build with a skeleton of steel girders and beams. Before, they laid a solid foundation and built as high as they could go with layers of gradually tapering bricks. Now, things were suspended in the air. Glass and concrete hung from the sky. Chicago was a cluster of dangling testimonials. Lest anyone should forget where the money came from.
“I want to go to the top of the Sears Tower,” I said.
The only way you can get rid of your fear of heights, they say, is to go somewhere high. I had nothing to lose. I was already falling.
“Okay.” He put his arm around me. We didn’t care if people stared.
First, we had to sit in a little theatre through a film of Oprah Winfrey telling us how great Chicago was. It included a brief history, the old melting pot chestnut of races and religions living happily together. It eulogized Frank Lloyd Wright, extolling the virtues of the city’s architecture. No gangsters. Some children with their parents sat beside us so I put my hand on his lap and felt up his leg. The kids stared. The parents frowned. How would they answer the questions that were bound to come? I had effectively upstaged Oprah Winfrey. This wasn’t in the history lesson.
When the elevator arrived to take us up, the parents held back their children to wait for the next one. We were alone. He held my hand all the way up. I was holding on for life. His knuckles were white when we got to the top. He told me I looked cute in the face of death and smiled. There was much more to what he said than he knew. He meant my fear of elevators. He could have been talking about his own death. He could have been talking about mine. I was worried about the both of us.
“They have backup cables,” he said. “It’s all in your head.”
Twilight kissed the horizon with crimson lips, rubbing up against the black, velvet night. We stood on the observation deck of America’s second-tallest building and watched the city turn itself on. We were like two street urchins looking at a sea of candlelit cakes in a bakery window at closing time. I put my arm around him. I wanted to write a saxophone sonata for him. I wanted to rob a bank, get caught, and tell the world on TV: I did it for him. I didn’t want to get back on that damn elevator alone.
“How come no one here talks about the gangsters?” I asked.
He slipped a hand into my back pocket. I liked that.
“The place where the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre happened, it’s an old folks home now,” he told me.
“But aren’t there any museums?” I asked. “You know, to keep a history of the gangland slayings, speakeasies, prohibition, mob rule. That stuff.”
“Not that I know of.” He leaned into the window and pressed his nose and lips against it. He left the imprint of a squashed kiss.
“People here aren’t proud of it. They want people to come here. They don’t want people to be afraid. They want people to think it’s not like that anymore.”
He wiped away his kiss with the sleeve of his jacket. “Crime is a part of the past. That’s where they want to keep it.”
“But it’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened here.”
The poor kid turned to me with a dead serious look on his mug. “There’s something wrong with me,” he said.
“I know.” I gave him a peck on the cheek.
He cleared his throat. “No. You don’t,” he said, angrily.
Making love is a little like arithmetic. You’re the sum of his parts, he’s the sum of yours. You’re both trying to find equal signs. It’s easy to add things up incorrectly. The night before, when I went home with him, it had been 100 per cent hand-in-glove. Almost. At Vortex, we flirted and tried to find out if our bodies would fit together like a pure equation. We tried things on to see where they fit. My hand there, his head here, that kind of thing. I like big feet — you’ve got big feet. Do you like to get rough? Me too. He wouldn’t let me kiss him, though.
I drank more beers; he drank more Cokes. At first, I wondered if he was religious or alcoholic. I started to piece things together when we went to his place. Typical student digs, not much furniture: a Mac on a desk, a few ramshackle bookshelves, stereo and VCR. Framed architectural renderings were scattered on the walls. A black-and-white poster of Louis Armstrong took up almost all of a door to the kitchen. No plants. There were humidifiers in every room, steaming with an antiseptic smell. Sure, it was late winter, it could get pretty dry with the heat cranked up. But every room? I noticed that the windows were sealed with tape.
“Music?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He looked a little embarrassed. “I’ve just got jazz stuff.”
“Fine by me.” He put on a Chet Baker CD.
He didn’t have any booze, so he offered me a coffee. He only had instant.
“I don’t drink it,” he said, and made himself herbal tea. When I asked for milk for my coffee, he told me he only had powdered creamer.
We twisted up together on the futon sofa, and I tried to neck with him, but he kept moving his mouth away. He seemed tense. Okay, I thought, a hang-up of some kind. So, I told him to take off his shirt, and gave him a massage until he relaxed. He had a slender physique, slightly muscular but natural. His skin was incredibly soft. There was something very sweet and vulnerable about him that reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t remember who. There was that nostalgic feeling again. His flesh and warmth were intoxicating. His body, naked, took me out of time.
He got up to go to the bathroom. I snooped in the kitchen. Sure enough, not a single dairy product in his fridge. Nothing that could succumb to bacteria. Nothing that could turn and become toxic. An army of natural vitamins — no preservatives — commandeered the shelf above the sink. If I could’ve thrown something and broken glass right then and there, I would have. But he hadn’t said anything to me, so I had to pretend I didn’t know.
We fooled around on the sofa for a while, no kissing, then headed for the bedroom. I stopped for a pee on the way. I flushed, then noticed a Rolodex on the toilet tank. It was a calendar, and each card included the date, the day of the week, and an inspirational saying, from Gandhi to Louise Hay. He was infected.
“You’re very passionate,” he said some time later, in bed.
He winced, still sensitive, as I removed his condom. I tried to prevent any of the fluid from spilling, and gingerly deposited it into a small plastic trash can, where it landed with a wet thud beside the one I had used earlier. I sealed the airtight lid and crawled back into bed.
“Thanks,” I replied. He’d flopped over onto his belly, with his head nestled in the crook of an elbow. I brushed my hand back and forth along his back, thinking of his illness. Wondering if I should say anything.
“That’s nice,” he said, opening his eyes and looking at me. He had long lashes. I’m the one who should be sick, I thought. I’m of an age.
He turned over and put his head on my chest. I wrapped my arms around him. We both stared at the ceiling. A humidifier puffed mistily in the background. Outside, a car passed, its motor decaying into the distance.
“Who’s that?” I asked, pointing at a framed picture on his night table of a handsome guy in an Air Force uniform, beside an inhaler for asthma. Was it his lover? Was he still alive?
“My brother,” he said. “He got killed in the war. Shot down.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, stunned. “Were you close?”
“Yeah. Pretty close. It was just the two of us. Stupid fucking war.” He pressed himself more tightly against me, putting his arms across his chest and taking my hands so that we were joined together like a Möbius strip.
“You’ve got beautiful eyes.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated softly in his ear.
He craned his head and gave me a confused smile. “But you do, really, have beautiful eyes.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
I had been imagining his brother flying over that distant desert, his plane plummeting in a spiral of flame, a corkscrew of fire twisting into barren dunes. “Was he by himself?”
“No. They don’t fly alone anymore, not with the planes they’ve got now. There were half a dozen guys.” He played distractedly with my fingers. “It’s no big deal. They’re all heroes.”
He pulled the photograph down from the night table and stared at it. “He’s a hero.” He looked at me. “At least that’s what the official letter said.”
“How old was he?”
“Twenty-two.” He smiled. “All he ever wanted to do since we were kids was fly.”
“I’m afraid of heights,” I said.
“So was he.”
Big Helen took a load off and sat down at my table for a quick break. She had a soda water in her hand. She watched TV with me. Love Connection.
“What do you make of the war?” I asked her, flipping to a rerun of a 1970s sitcom.
“Baby, I got my own wars.” She slipped off a shoe and rubbed her foot. “Three of ’em, sitting at home. And they’re hungry. Excuse me while I go sing for their supper.”
One of the roadies was at the bar staring at her impatiently.
“I’m coming, baby. Don’t get your pants in a bunch.”
Monsieur Delacroix sashayed into the Sea of Happiness, looking odd and drawing attention. He headed for my table in a straight line.
“Hey, Frenchie!” yelled Trailer Park.
Monsieur Delacroix tossed him a Queen Elizabeth wave and parked his butt beside me. He didn’t look too good. His eyes were pink and puffy; his complexion was pale.
“Rough night last night?” I asked mercilessly.
“The worst, my dear, the worst,” he declaimed. “We’ve been here long enough. I think it’s time we went back.”
“I’m not going,” I said, and flipped to MTV. “Holiday.” An early Madonna song. I’d left a Depression behind me in Toronto. I wasn’t going back.
“But it’s only meant to be a holiday,” implored Monsieur Delacroix. Then he noticed the look in my eyes. “Oh, my dear, you haven’t?”
“I have.”
Big Helen came to the table with Monsieur’s cocktail and a package of pork rinds, his favourite snack. He ripped it open and munched. He offered me some. I declined. I’ve never been one for pig fascia deep-fried in oil. I thought about the bones beneath the ground at Graceland.
“I suppose that means I must go alone,” Monsieur Delacroix said softly, looking at the wall screen.
“Yes,” I said.
Madonna was telling everyone it could be so nice.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
We were on the observation deck. He stared eastward to the lake, or where the lake would be if you could see it. Night obscured the horizon.
“No one believes me. They leave,” he said. “It’s like being a convict or something. Hey, this is America. Guilty until proven innocent, right?”
“I guess so,” I said, feeling more ebullient than I had in years, despite my mistake. I was a little guilty about my selfishness.
“The Geraldo show called me up to be a guest, like I’m a freak show.”
I kissed him on the mouth, this time with my lips closed. Now it was okay. I understood.
“Sometimes, even if they believe me, they leave,” he said. “They get a taste of danger, then go. At least I can’t give it to anybody. That’s the only good thing about it.”
I figured that it must be lonely. I thought about those who feed on loneliness, draw their energy from it, and depart. A trench coat in the shadows, a hat with the brim turned down, a wolfish smile. The cockteaser: shame.
“Is everyone where you come from like you?” he asked.
“No. No one knows who they are where I come from,” I joked. “I suppose I don’t really have a place of my own, yet.”
We walked to the elevator door.
He had told me the truth. At some point when his components were being mixed together, his DNA got dizzy and put its foot down. Born with a suppressed immune system. Genetic. He was allergic to practically every natural thing in his environment; almost all microscopic organisms and agents that produce or sustain life could kill him. Sealed windows. No preservatives. No bacteria or pollens. Even protected, he was at risk. He’d spent his whole life looking over his shoulder. I wanted to be his bodyguard.
“A crime against nature,” he called himself.
“You should be proud,” I told him.
“What?”
“Nature’s been overrated ever since we invented it. It’s a big cliché.” I mimed a fake yawn. “Boring.”
The elevator door opened. He took my hand.
“You’re a healthy sign that nature’s falling apart at the seams,” I continued. “Write a book about it. You’ll make a mint. And go on Geraldo. Do all the talk shows. People want something new.”
We stepped onto the elevator. The children and their parents, who again had been standing behind us in a nervous state, decided once again to wait for the next one.
“It won’t be easy,” he said. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” I replied, “I’m sure.” The door closed and I put my arms around him. I planned to eat him up alive, to swallow his eyes, his lips, his tight little ass, his blood, to consume every inch of his flesh so that it was buried deep inside me, undetectable and beautiful and alive and safe. He could go outside through me.
“Later, you might regret it,” he said.
I looked at him. We were alone in the elevator, which had begun its descent. “Regret what?”