The Salt Point

by Paul Russell

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the award-winning author of The Coming Storm comes the brilliantly conceived and precisely rendered novel The Salt Point, a compelling novel of four people and their intermingled and unwinding desires.

Anatole loves Leigh ("Our Boy of the Mall"), a great adolescent beauty. Leigh is sleeping with Lydia, Anatole's best friend, who's fighting turning thirty. Chris, once the stunning object of Anatole's desire, is an unscrupulous friend to all and known to none.

Set in a Poughkeepsie mall--the Main Street to a new generation--The Salt Point follows Anatole, Leigh, Chris, and Lydia as they achieve their oddly triumphant lives redolent with loss and hope, humor and sadness, union and alienation. As promises are diminished and futures are abandoned, all four hurtle toward that place in which the nature of things is transmuted: a place not unlike the salt point, that unfixed location in the Hudson River where fresh water turns salty.

Release date: September 9, 2000

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

THE SALT POINT

I
SEPTEMBER
On Poughkeepsie's Main Street, the pedestrian mall, a boy sits. This is how it begins: Lydia and Anatole seeing, out two separate windows, this boy perched on the back of a bench. Lydia leans her forehead against the windowpane of Boutique Elegance, recently opened and soon to go out of business. She's bored. She stares. Across the street at Reflexion Anatole is hectic, darting to the window in between customers. Together they fix the boy in the angle of their gaze.
They don't know his name. They know nothing about him. He eats a frozen chocolate bar--a slight boy, seventeen or eighteen. He crosses his legs like a girl. Behind him, the fountains are dry. The trees have died. The broken concrete underfoot yields up the dust and heat of an afternoon whose temperature tips ninety. This boy has thinarms, dishwater-blond hair that falls in a long lock over one eye. He licks the frozen chocolate bar.
There are five billion people in the world. Nobody matters very much. He wears jeans, a white T-shirt, black loafers without socks. His profile is perfect.


Chris Havilland is drinking scotch in Bertie's when Lydia and Anatole burst in.
"Oh God am I glad you're here," Anatole tells him.
"I'm always here, remember?"
Anatole flings himself exhaustedly down in the booth.
"Every once in a while you just need independent confirmation. You know, a voice from the outside."
"Anatole, what are you talking about? Lydia, what is Anatole talking about?"
"Lydia knows," Anatole exclaims. "Lydia saw. Lydia can tell you I'm not crazy."
"You are crazy, Anatole," Lydia reminds him. "It's why we like you, remember?"
"I'm boy crazy," he tells Chris simply.
"Oh please. Not again?" It's a joke among them, how Anatole's always falling in love with teenage boys. He glimpses them in supermarkets, movie theaters, they occupy his whole life for the space of a few hours or days, then he forgets about them. Whenever he and Chris and Lydia are out together, he's always pointing out what boy has just stolen his heart. It alarms Chris, it seems dangerous and ill-advised, and he's always wanting to lead Anatole away to somewhere where it's safe, where he won't be tormented by these visions.
"I know what you're thinking," Anatole tells Chris. "But this one was different. The light around him was different."
"Oh?"
"It was lighter."
Chris leans back and draws on his cigarette. He knows it's an affectation, one he suspects his friends used to be impressed by, but now don't notice much anymore.
"Don't tell me you tried to pick him up," he teases, trying tomask a vague unease. "I know you: you leaned out the window and hooted down at him or something embarrassing."
"Don't I wish? You're nothing but a heretic," Anatole complains. "This wasn't just boy, this was divine."
"You saw the vision too?" Chris turns to Lydia. She and Anatole always seem to be noticing exactly the same thing, only from different angles.
"It was one of those moments," she admits.
"You sound almost grim."
"You had to be there."
"Oh God. Why do I feel like groaning?" Chris is conscious of playing the skeptical third. But it's okay--it means he's the one the others defer to, as if they expect him to judge them, to find them wanting.
"You'll see," Anatole tells him.
"Yeah, sure. So when's the shrine going up?"
"You laugh. There'll be healings."
"Shrine of Our Boy of the Mall." Chris tries it out.
"Exactly." Anatole is quiet for a moment, as if considering the implications. "I'll never see him again," he says.
"Think of it as a narrow escape," Chris tells him, but immediately he regrets his tone--it's everything he doesn't like about himself, his aloofness, his shielding wit. He sees how Lydia and Anatole glance at each other--an instant--to say, He doesn't understand these things. We didn't really think he would.
And he hasn't. Or if he has, he wants to keep aloof from it. There's something in the alliances Anatole and Lydia construct that leaves him out--despite his tangled history with both of them. When the three of them are together, he always feels he's the third. Probably it's because he's the newcomer--three years ago he hadn't met either one of them--while Anatole and Lydia both grew up in Poughkeepsie, they've known each other Since When, as they like to say. I'm just visiting this place, Chris will tell himself. I don't live here, but they do--and he doesn't know whether that difference saddens or liberates him. For the three years he's lived in Poughkeepsie, he's lived apart from it--treading water, as it were, never breaking the surface. Allhe wants is a place to hide, and Immaculate Blue, the record store he manages on Academy Street, allows him exactly that. Poughkeepsie allows him exactly that.
They're best friends, Chris and Anatole and Lydia. Either the first wave of Poughkeepsie's long-awaited gentrification or its last stand, they like to think of themselves as beautiful, chic, to be envied--"the only thing this goddamned city's got going for it," they'll joke among themselves, especially when it's late at night and they're drunk, or stoned, or bored. Together they share complicated pasts, common frustrations. Their friendship is a balancing of forces that would otherwise part them, a constant reorientation of needs, crises, deflections at depths they are reluctant to plumb. For each of them it is different, for none of them does it remain a single, definable thing.


Main Street's deserted, the moon's out, a thin crescent. They walk in a loose contingent, Daniel and Anatole, Lydia and Marion. In a Macy's shopping bag Marion carries bottles of champagne.
Daniel is Anatole's business partner, and he's pretending he's in a Madonna video. He wears an enormous string of pearls, knotted. A tight black skirt, blue turtleneck, a beret with a costume diamond brooch affixed. His long blond hair falls below it. He's singing "Like a Virgin," velvet falsetto. Anatole frisks with him, trying--but failing--to be suave and mysterious as the man wearing the lion mask in the video. With liquid movements Daniel tries to turn Main Street into the canals of Venice. He's in a gondola, he's on an arched bridge, he's in a palace and a twilit Adriatic breeze is blowing the gauze curtains out into the room.
Daniel's the star hairdresser at Reflexion--if it wasn't for him, the salon would go under in a month. But he's also a little crazy. At night he'll do Ecstasy, roam Poughkeepsie's streets in drag, so good he's seldom mistaken for a man. Last month the police picked him up for DWI--he was driving around in his Rabbit with the headlights off. At first the officer thought he was carrying a fake driver's license. "'Daniel'? Come on, lady, what kind of a name's that?"
Deep in conversation, Lydia and Marion ignore Daniel's and Anatole's antics. Marion's telling Lydia how wonderful the two are to her, how just knowing them has changed her life. Lydia sighs--Marion's simply the latest in a long line of Daniel-and-Anatole groupies, a collection of women who swear miracles by them. In any other city it might be a famous therapist, or a dance teacher. Here it's Daniel and Anatole--who specialize in these lonely women they flatter into expensive dye jobs, elaborate and prolonged programs of hair reconstitution. They made a date with her--come by Saturday, bring champagne, we'll remake you. It'll be fabulous, it'll change your life, doll.
To Lydia--who's just along for the champagne, the company on a Saturday night--it feels sad. This fat woman's really thrilled, she thinks; she's thrilled because they've talked her into thinking this may after all be the thing that will change her life. Things'll be different. She'll find love.
Just be careful, Lydia wants to tell Marion. But she doesn't. She walks beside Marion and pretends not to enjoy how Daniel and Anatole cavort. They leap into a dry fountainbed. Daniel pretends to splash, to let the jet of invisible water drench him.
Let Marion learn, Lydia thinks. Anyway, she doesn't like her very much; she's a fat, pathetic intruder. A little overweight herself, or at least convinced she's overweight, Lydia hates without mercy women who are fat.
Marion lopes along in her huge cornflower blue dress, Princess Diana stockings and slippers, and Lydia thinks: Who the hell are you? What Mad Hatter tea party did you stumble out of?
But Marion is drunk, she's talkative. "Aren't they fabulous?" She indicates the two dancing figures. "It's so interesting to me. Women like us."
"What do you mean, 'women like us'?"
Marion seems for a moment to want to backtrack, but then plunges bravely ahead. "Oh, you know. Fag hags."
"I don't consider myself a fag hag," Lydia says politely. She wants to make Marion suffer.
"Oh, I don't mean anything; I mean, I don't want to put you,to put anybody, down or anything. We're all in it together. Am I talking too much? I had a lot to drink before I came here. I was trying to get my nerve up."
Anatole and Daniel are pirouetting in the moonlight. "Like a virgin," they screech at the empty buildings. In the doorway of Schwartz's, two black men lift a sack-wrapped whiskey bottle in a toast, "Yah yah yah," they sing in hoarse chorus. "White girls," they yell. "Come over here, suck my cock, white girls."
Daniel turns to Anatole. "Want to?"
"Sounds fun. I bet they got humongous cocks."
"Foot-long hot dogs."
"Monster dongs."
"Put his foot in yo mouff."
Daniel and Anatole strutting arm in arm, whooping it up. The two black men suddenly seem to be having second thoughts. They shy back into the shadows, brandishing their bottle as if to ward off what it is they've unleashed.
"They're so crazy," Marion observes.
"They're doing it for you." Lydia dry, a bit alienated. "They're trying to work you up to the mood before they get their hands on your hair. So watch out."
"I'm ready for anything."
Then they are clattering up the stairs to Reflexion. "Chez Barbarella, it looks more like," Anatole admits. "Make yourself at home."
Standing on tiptoes, stretching his arms wide, Daniel takes a picture off the wall. It's nearly as big as he is--the Calvin Klein poster of a model naked except for briefs, smooth skin oiled and bronzed, against a backdrop of blindingly white stucco wall. Romantic gaze, off camera, stage right. What sailors does he see entering the harbor? What boys cavorting bare on the beach? Above him the blue sky of Mykonos. Daniel dusts off the glass with a cloth, then proceeds diligently to deposit a pyramid of coke in the center of the picture, where the model's navel is. With his American Express card he cuts it into eight long thin lines, bars across the model's body. "Drugs is a terrible prison," Daniel laughs, inviting Marion and Lydia to partake. "Let'sfree this boy." Anatole busies himself with opening the champagne bottle. He opens a window, leans far out, lets the cork shoot into the night.
"You should do business like this all the time," Marion tells them, bending low over the picture, closing one nostril with her fingertip.
"Go to it, girl," Daniel advises her, running his hands through his long blond hair, shaking it out luxuriously. "Sniff that crotch."
"Don't make me laugh. It'll be expensive."
"She's got an idea, you know." Anatole pours champagne into plastic cups. "Set up midnight rates. We'll steal Astor Place's clientele. They'll drive up from the City in pink Cadillacs."
"Dream on, darling," Daniel purrs, bending a nostril close to the glass, sniffing up the line. "Ah"--he straightens, breathes deep--"wake up and smell that coffee."
Anatole flicks a tape in the box he's got on the counter: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Lydia moves around the room to the beat. The hairdressing equipment looks strange and wonderful in the harsh light. She's bored, but doesn't mind. She likes being here when there're no customers, when it's just them. They know the secret life of the place, and to know the secret life of anything is to lift you out of yourself.
Daniel and Anatole have settled Marion into a chair, draped her with a drop cloth, it's as if a surgery's going to be performed. Daniel is fluent and excited--he only really comes alive when the prospect of hair is before him. He's like a boy about to have sex for the first time. He arranges mirrors around her, contemplates her every way he can. "Doll, you're in for the treat of your life," Anatole assures her. Daniel is snipping shears at thin air; already he's shaping her in the abstract. He runs his hand though her thick dark masses. "Very Irish hair," he tells her. "Very colleen country-girl look."
"I don't want to look like a country girl," Marion tells him.
"Of course you don't. The sophisticated look. Very short, I think. Clipped, sharp. Witty."
"And the color," Anatole adds. "You can't keep that brunette."
"How about giddy blonde?" Daniel keeps looking at her like apainter angling his subject. "I think giddy blonde'd be perfect. Marilyn meets the Marine Corps. It'll accent the Manhattan chop effect, set up a rhythm of tensions, it'll just be fabulous."
"I'm putting my life in your hands," Marion tells them, holding out her cup for more champagne. "I'm just going to lie back and take a nap and when I wake up I'll be a new person. How's that?"
"Doll, you're so trusting. You're like, perfect. Have you considered really dramatic colors?"
"Like?"
"Anatole, get the cellophanes. There. See these? They're really vibrant. Prism cellophanes. They'll wash out in a month. They won't hurt your hair."
Marion considers.
"Go for it," Anatole urges. "In a hundred years, more like ten probably, we'll all be dead. Nobody'll care whether you had a little fun with your life."
"Sure," Marion says. "Why not? Just pour me some more champagne."
"We could do stripes," Daniel says, tapping his chin with his finger, an artist deep in thought. "Eggplant purple in back, fantail effect"--he gestures expressivley at her head, shaping the new look with his hands--"then this lovely wine red and electric blue, alternating, on the sides."
"Does she need to sign a rights waiver? What's our lawyer's current thinking?"
"I'll sign anything," Marion says. She's very drunk. The coke and champagne are an immense wave of light lifting her toward the ceiling, where the view is infinite. In a single motion Daniel flips Marion's reclining chair back--"Whoops!" she cries--so her head rests above the sink. Vigorously he rinses her scalp, applies shampoo. All at once the room smells of fresh coconuts. Another rinse, then conditioner, wheat and honey. "Anybody for tahini?" Marion jokes under Daniel's long, energetic fingers.
It's not turning out to be as fun for Lydia as she expected. Suddenly she's jealous of the attention Daniel and Anatole are giving to Marion. It surprises her, but there's nothing she can do about it. Shesits sidesaddle on the window ledge and looks down at Main Street. It's empty, a bleak expanse of concrete and a few straggling trees, none of it made magical by a thin moonlight. Am I like this? she thinks. It's Anatole and Daniel at their worst--Daniel seems to bring it out in Anatole, a kind of desperate camp that's finally heartless, even destructive. If she didn't dislike Marion, fear her as a usurper, a disturbing mirror of her own condition, she'd feel sorry for her. As it is, depressingly enough, what's happening to her at their hands seems a species of sweet revenge.
When she looks back at the trio, Marion is sitting upright, her head covered in a tight rubber cap with holes in it. She could be an experiment in a science fiction movie. Daniel's a demented Marilyn Monroe turned lab assistant as he uses what looks like a crochet needle to pull strands of hair through the holes. "Ow," Marion half cries, half laughs. "That hurts."
"It's art--what do you expect, baby doll?"
"Ow." Marion cringes beneath Daniel's retrieval of her hair from the rubber torture cap.
"All finished." Daniel pats her hand. "You survived. Now we bleach."
"What did one bleached whale say to the other?" Anatole asks.
"I'm so washed up I could dye," Daniel tells him.
"You've heard it?"
"I think I made it up, darling." He twirls a small paintbrush in a bowl, then daubs bleach along the strands of exposed hair. "I think," he notices casually, "the bleached whale is out cold." And she is. She snores, head tilted back, empty champagne cup cradled in her lap like a favorite toy. Beneath Daniel's hands her dark, luxurious brunette dies, whitens like bone. Daniel tips her back once more into the sink and turns on the water. She comes awake spluttering, eyes wild. "Professor, it's alive, we've created life," Daniel shouts. "It's all right," he soothes Marion. "We're ready to paint. Frank Stella would die."
He dips a brush into the bowl, then stands poised, contemplating. "Next stop, Glamourville," he announces.
Anatole watches Marion's face. Her faith in Daniel is touching. Out cold, face gone jelly, she looks like someone who's been expectingthe worst but is resigned to it, is convinced it's the best thing. With exaggerated flourishes, Daniel lays the eggplant purple on boldly, thickly.
Anatole hums along with the OMD tape, he mouths the words even though he doesn't know most of them. It exhilarates him, it seems just perfect--this moment, all these people here together. Marion unconscious, Daniel daubing eggplant purple, Lydia sitting on the window ledge sipping champagne. It's the kind of thing he likes more than anything else. At the same time he feels empty, he doesn't want to be here. He wants to be with Chris.
It's the secret he carries around all the time. Whatever he's doing, no matter how much fun he's having, it's empty unless Chris is there. His crush on Chris has dominated his life for two years, ever since he met him one June afternoon on the Metro North between New York and Poughkeepsie. He was coming back from a day spent shopping in the City. At Croton-Harmon, passengers for Poughkeepsie have to change trains. This particular afternoon, the connecting train hadn't pulled in yet, and as the passengers for Poughkeepsie stood waiting on the exposed platform, a thunderstorm sprang up--big drops of water, bolts of lightning that shot into the green hills around the station. The light was eerie the way light in sudden thunderstorms can be, and Anatole was terrified of the lightning. If you hear the thunder, you know it hasn't hit you, he remembered his father telling him when he was a child. Still, the waiting between thunderbursts was unbearable. The sky was alive with crackling bolts. Every instant, not knowing if it would strike you: this instant, or this--was it your last?
He stood shivering under his umbrella, resisting the urge to cower, wondering if it was true that an umbrella acts as a lightning rod. Finally he couldn't stand it any longer. Nervously, he turned to the person next to him to try to make contact with someone else who was in the same predicament.
"I just love risking my life to get to Poughkeepsie."
"I wouldn't stand so close to me," the stranger said. "God's got too many things against me for it to be safe."
Just then there was another flash of light, a blast of thunder, andAnatole looked at the man he'd spoken to. It was the oddest thing--at the instant of the thunderbolt it seemed as if he were looking at an angel who'd just flashed into being, golden hair slicked down by the rain, soaked through to the skin.
"God's not such a great shot." Anatole laughed nervously.
"You wait." Chris grinned. "He's got a lot of ammunition."
But at that moment the Poughkeepsie train pulled alongside the platform. They scurried inside, sat in seats across the aisle from each other. Wind and rain buffeted the silver Hudson, the gray-green hills. In a few minutes the sun came out. By the time the train got to Poughkeepsie Anatole had volunteered practically everything he could think of about himself, and in the process had managed to learn that this gorgeous stranger's name was Chris Havilland, that he worked in the record store on Academy Street and that the two of them shared the same birthday, July first, the exact middle of the year.
He phoned Lydia later that night.
"So how was New York?" She knew he hadn't looked forward to going down.
"You'll never guess. I'm a wreck. Lydia, sweetheart, I met the man of my dreams."
"Again? Is he over eighteen?"
"Lydia. You'll approve of him. He gave me his phone number, he asked me to call him. He looks like David Bowie."
"David Bowie's old."
"He looks the way David Bowie used to look. He looks like the cover of Station to Station."
A few days later he managed to work up the courage to call Chris. At first Chris seemed not to remember him, and Anatole's heart sank, but then something seemed to click and Chris sounded suddenly enthusiastic. "Oh. The train," he said. "Of course. How about dinner? I like the Milanese. Do you ever go there?"
After four glasses of wine, they're both relaxed, talkative. Anatole's content to sit in candlelight and watch the impossibly perfect face before him. I can't believe I'm this lucky, he tells himself. He means--just to be here. Anatole is thankful for small things. It's why people like him, even against their inclination.
"It's nice to meet somebody interesting in this city," Chris tells him. "You were funny in that little rain shower--"
"It was a thunderstorm--"
"--that little rain shower. I liked that. You know, I've been here in Poughkeepsie a year now, and I don't know anybody. I haven't met people I want to know. I didn't grow up here, I didn't grow up in the East at all. I'm from Denver."
"Denver." Anatole's never been west of Buffalo, where he used to visit cousins when he was a child. "So how'd you end up here?"
"I'm here on my father's business, you might say. What I mean is, the record store I manage, Immaculate Blue--it belongs to him. It's some kind of tax dodge or something like that--I don't know exactly, I don't want to know. I just look after it. I get to work with records, which is all I really like. Music records." He laughs nervously, lights a cigarette. "My dad's lawyers handle the other records."
"You must be close to your dad," Anatole observes.
"No," Chris laughs abrubtly, wryly. "Actually, we don't get along at all. My being here's a kind of deal, I think. My dad's very tough, very air force; he used to be a colonel, then he retired and went into real estate development--made incredible amounts of money. We were always moving to a bigger house, he kept buying boats and Winnebagos. He did it to get me out of his hair, see? I kept dropping out of schools. It was getting too embarrassing for him. He was afraid I'd end up in the East Village as a waiter or something. Dad wants a respectable son. So that's why I'm taking his money. I don't know. Maybe it's a way of getting back at him. Because he likes the wrong things about me. Or maybe it's because I'm afraid to do anything on my own because I know I'll fail, so I have to let him do it for me."
He looks in his wineglass, as if fascinated by some reflection in it. Anatole watches him, afraid to say anything that will sound stupid.
"No," Chris tells him abruptly, "I'll tell you what it is. When I was little--like, the first thing I remember--we were playing follow the leader, Dad and me; we were walking along this little brick wall, the edge of a patio; he was leading, I was following, and then I fell off the wall. I broke my arm. Chipped the elbow. I think that's the source of everything." He pauses, then groans loudly, almost despairingly."Oh, I don't really care. Anatole, usually I don't talk about these things. I'm not interested in them. I'm just doing this to test you."
"Oh?" It confuses Anatole a bit. "Do I pass?"
Chris looks at him across the tapering candle flame. "We'll see, won't we?"
They look at each other for a minute, neither looking away. Anatole feels dizzy, he feels scared. Then Chris looks down at the table, lights up a cigarette. Anatole's crazy about the way Chris handles his cigarettes. It's enough to make him want to smoke.
"I'm exhausted," Chris says. "I've had a bad day. I'm being too talkative."
"I love it."
"Oh, you'll get bored with it, don't worry."
Later, it's what Anatole holds on to, that phrase "you'll get bored with it." More than anything he wants a chance to get bored with Chris Havilland. He doesn't know if he'll see him again. He doesn't know if the evening has "passed."
But Chris does call. Over the course of that summer they meet once a week for drinks, or for dinner. Chris is never again quite so revealing. He banters, but seldom descends into seriousness. It's Anatole who does most of the talking.
Nevertheless--one humid August night they're standing in the restaurant parking lot beside their respective cars, but neither seems quite to want to go home. "Well," Anatole says. Suddenly he is very nervous. Is this what they've been edging toward over the slow summer? He was quick to admit liking to sleep with men, he has nothing to hide. Chris listened politely, but said nothing. That was two dinners ago; it seems not to have affected their relationship one way or the other. Now tonight Chris says, "We just go on and on like this, don't we?"
"What do you mean?"
"Circling." He laughs. "It's crazy."
Anatole doesn't know what to say. He knows he's supposed to say something, he's conscious of an opportunity and of missing that opportunity, but he can think of nothing that will catch it.
"You could come back to my place for a nightcap," he suggests.
There's a pause, he waits for Chris to say no. The night itself seems to have paused in its business, to be listening to them to see how it will turn out.
"Sure," Chris tells him, smiling. "A nightcap."
In Anatole's apartment--big Victorian rooms, dark wood, lots of furniture he inherited from a grandmother--Chris sits on a sofa while Anatole brings scotch in a cut-glass decanter, glasses and a bowl of ice on a tray.
"Fancy," Chris tells him.
"I just get nervous when I have guests. I overdo it."
They sit together on the sofa and drink in silence. The apartment feels big but intimate. Anatole tries to broach the difficult subject. "It's funny," he says, "when I think back to the beginning of summer. How I didn't know. How I couldn't ever have guessed." He looks at Chris; it's awkward, sitting side by side like this; so he plunges ahead. "It's always hard to talk about, isn't it?" He laughs, but then is grave. "Can I say you've sort of changed my life this summer? That I'm alive now. Is that okay to say?"
He watches Chris for signs of retreat, but there don't seem to be any.
"I guess what I'm saying is," he says, "I think I'm sort of in love with you."
As he says it he puts his hand on Chris's shoulder. His heart is beating so fast, he's afraid he'll have a heart attack.
"Okay." Chris's laugh is halfhearted but gentle. Anatole waits for him to say something more, to touch him, to do something. But nothing happens. Chris lifts Anatole's hand from his shoulder; he pats it. "I like you, Anatole," he says.
"Do you understand what I'm trying to say?" Anatole asks.
"I do understand." Chris is firm but tender. "Remember, you don't want to stand too close to me. Lightning."
"But I want it to strike. I've been waiting my whole life."
Chris smiles fondly, shakes his head. "I was afraid," he says. He takes a sip of his scotch. "I'm going to go now. Call me soon, okay?"
It's the closest they've gotten, that moment--a high-water markthey never reach again. But Anatole remembers it. He'll catch himself thinking of it at moments like this, and then feel far from everything that's happening around him, the chatter and bustle. He thinks about it all the time; even though more than two years have passed since that night and he and Chris have become, as they say, best friends, it makes a lump in his throat to remember. The highest moment of his life. He's slept with lots of other boys, he's slept with Daniel--it's not that. Rather, it's the closest he's ever gotten, he tells himself, to something--he can't name it, he doesn't even know for sure what it is. All he knows is that it matters more to him than anything else in his life.
"Here, doll," Daniel is saying. He pats Marion's cheek, then gives a deft slap to bring her around. She sputters as she hits consciousness again. "Keep your eyes closed, honey. Your heart just stopped for a while. You probably had an out-of-the-body experience, right?"
"Are we finished?" she murmurs groggily. Obedient, she keeps her eyes shut.
Daniel pauses to contemplate her. "They're going to take you right to heaven," he tells her. "You're not even going to have to wait. Patti LaBelle'll swoon when she hears about this."
"I'm afraid to look." Marion's trying hard to stay conscious long enough to savor that first glimpse in the mirror, the "You" she's asked for and never thought she'd really get.
It's a losing battle, though.
Daniel addresses the once more inert form in front of him. "Your self-control, darling, is admirable." He touches up the sides, then frowns, almost pouts while Anatole puts both hands to his temples, eyes wide, and mouths a silent Yikes.
Lydia watches it all coolly, pensively. She feels far from their antics. They're tiresome, their larks bore her after a while. But they're her friends. Anatole's her best friend in the world. "Fag hag"--Marion's words from earlier in the evening annoy Lydia, but they also haunt her.
It seems impossible that things can have lasted between her and Anatole as long as they have. But then, they've been through everythingtogether: between them there's a special understanding that survives her feelings of entrapment, of futility. I should be dating eligible men, she tells herself, I should find a man to make love to, to marry. But she's paralyzed. She wonders if it's Anatole