Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [48]
That was the first thing she thought when she met him, and her next thought was that nothing could be stupider. By now she should have realized that you didn’t have to look gay to be gay. She didn’t look gay, and Bobbie didn’t look gay, and neither did the majority of the girls she knew. But she did not know many male homosexuals, so she still thought of them in terms of the convenient stereotypes.
Terry didn’t fit the image. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a deep voice and a strong chin and a rugged profile. He had none of the mannerisms of the effeminate male, and yet he was a thoroughgoing homosexual. That was why she was with him now.
The whole thing had been arranged just a few hours before. Bobbie got a frantic phone call late in the afternoon, talked quickly, then turned to Rhoda. “It’s Bernie Jaeckel,” she said. “You remember him, don’t you? He’s a gay boy, I think you met him at that big blast at Rita’s.”
She remembered him vaguely. “So?”
“He’s with a boy named Terry Langer now. And Terry got a letter, this morning, that his parents are coming to town. The surprise visit bit, Rho. They want us to front for them. Double up with the boys tonight. Terry’s folks don’t know he’s gay and he doesn’t want them to suspect anything. And you know, two fellows sharing apartment.”
It was funny, she thought. Before she met Megan, before she got herself caught up in the shadow world of homosexuality, she never would have thought twice about two men sharing an apartment. It was cheaper that way, it was less lonely. But once you were on the inside you began looking at things in a different light. If two men lived together, and if their apartment was in Brooklyn Heights or the Village or around Broadway and Seventy-second, and if they didn’t go out much with girls, you began to suspect that they were homosexual.
“Is it okay, Rho?”
She said it was and Bobbie settled the arrangements. The Langers were due around four in the afternoon. At two-thirty, she and Bobbie cabbed over to the boys’ apartment on West 69th Street. For a little over an hour the four of them sat around a bridge table drinking coffee and talking about people they knew, about plans for New Year’s Eve, and, finally, about the best way to handle Mr. and Mrs. Langer. Now and then Bernie Jaeckel would dart around the apartment destroying evidence—picking up a stray male physique magazine and tucking it out of sight, deliberately shoving furniture out of place or overturning an ashtray to disrupt the apartment’s almost feminine neatness.
“We ought to change the furniture,” he said at one point. “If we really wanted to do this in style, we would move out all the furniture and re-do the pad in Early Heterosexual. You know, blonde Danish modern from Grand Rapids. Metallic pole lamps. Long wrap-around sectional couches.”
“Ughhh,” Terry said.
Bobbie suggested hanging a bra in the bathroom. “But we have to walk a thin line,” Terry said. “I have to seem straight, but we don’t want to give them the idea that Rhoda and I are living in sin.”
“Would they mind?”
“My parents would. I’m an only child, you know. I think the moment of my conception was the only time my parents made love.”
“You don’t even want a few stockings tossed over the shower curtain?”
Terry chuckled. “Nothing,” he said. “Just so they see that I have a girl friend. That’s all it should take.”
“Don’t they suspect—”
“They have no idea,” he said.
The Langers arrived a few minutes early. Mr. Langer was short and heavy set, with a prominent nose and a bulldog chin and a perpetual cigar in his mouth. Rhoda had a mental image of Berne and Terry spending the next two weeks trying to air cigar smoke out of the draperies. She could picture them running around frantically and spraying everything with Chanel. Mrs. Langer was a small and slender woman who did not talk much. Terry kissed her on the cheek and shook hands firmly with his father.
After introductions, Terry said, “You should have let me know you were coming. We already had plans with the girls for tonight.”
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Langer