The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [26]
It felt nice just sitting here, being simultaneously alone and among friends. He was happy to let the conversation go on around him, and no one seemed to care that he wasn’t saying much of anything. Warren was carrying most of the conversation, as he generally did when he was in a manic phase; when the pendulum swayed the other way he generally kept to himself. He moved the ball around now, interspersing a running put-down of Arthur Miller with various numbers on absent members of the theatrical company.
“Did you know that he actually thought Salesman was a comedy? He wrote it as a comedy and when he was all finished he read through it and thought it was a comedy. So he gave it to someone to read and they said ‘baby, this is tragic,’ and he thought, ‘Oh, then it’s a tragedy.’”
“You are oversimplifying and—”
“Oh, of course I am, Bryce. I don’t want to put us all to sleep, do I? But consider that play staged as comedy. Would you care for that job?”
“I enjoy directing it traditionally.”
“And you do it brilliantly, dear boy. No one denies it But the author saw it as a comedy! Now there are plays that work both ways. Hamlet, for example. Has there ever been a better comic character than Polonius? Those incredible gusts of pompous wind. And then the man is slain by mistake! Or the soliloquy, the famous and genuinely beautiful soliloquy, with its metaphors so thoroughly mixed it could have been written by a Waring blender, except that it transcends its own ridiculous elements. Imagine the soliloquy—”
Peter faded out of the conversation, let the warmth and cadence of the voices soothe him without bothering to register the words.
Warren fascinated him, and this fascination in turn worried Peter. Warren delighted in flaunting his homosexuality in a way Peter could not comprehend. He could understand people insisting on the right to be openly homosexual. He could similarly understand the Gay Militants with their “Gay Is Proud” slogan. But Warren’s approach took neither of these forms. He did not defend his rights so much as he took them for granted, and instead of exuding homosexual pride he managed at once to mock himself and the heterosexual world.
Peter could never have carried it off, and knew it. Even when he had been able to accept himself as gay he had been unable to believe deeply that homosexuality was normal or respectable. Occasionally he worried that it was this disbelief that turned him away from male lovers and toward female ones. Most of the time he rejected this line of thought, feeling instead that homosexuality had been for him a logical developmental stage, a stage very much consistent with his personality and upbringing, but no more than a stage for him on the road to adult heterosexuality. He was not yet entirely secure enough to be comfortable when Warren vamped him. He knew that it was a game and not to be taken seriously, but like every game it had its serious aspects, and if Warren was kidding, he was also kidding on the square. And he would not be doing so if he did not think Peter was something of a prospect, and where there was smoke and all that, and Peter wished he were more confident that Warren was wrong.
The first time he had not known what was happening. Later on he would imagine that he must have known, must have sensed what it was all about, but he was fourteen years old and drug-wise and sex-foolish, a fair and slender boy who hitchhiked back and forth from Newton every day after school because New Hope was where it was happening.
He remembered the driver, remembered the upholstery of the car, remembered the sound of the man’s voice but could not summon up a picture of the face. The stream of questions—Did he like girls, did he like to jerk off—a