Jackie and Me(56)
rushing us past each obstruction (the complaints department, the information desk) and sweeping us clear of our
linoleum surroundings. We let the door close behind us and
came down the stone steps, my trousers bunching under
my feet because I hadn’t stopped to refasten my suspenders. There wasn’t time. If I could have, I would have walked straight back to Baltimore, trousers dragging behind me like a silent-film comic’s, but I only got as far as the street before I . . .
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Broke down is the best way to describe it. The systemic failure that left me collapsed on the nearest bench, head in hands, weeping volcanically. Sobs of such an extreme pitch that I quailed before them, for they seemed entirely independent of me. A broken levee that could never be patched.
“It’s all right,” said Jackie. “Let it out, darling. Let it all out.”
Well, it’s been true all my life. If one has been—has been
bared in some painful, involuntary way, one’s friends will often, in the spirit of compensation or fellow feeling, reveal something about themselves, as if to say: “Let’s be naked together, shall we?” So it was with Jackie, who chose that
moment to tell me about Johnny Marquand and the elevator
and the whole messy business. And how strangely healing it
was to hear it.
There’s no point dwelling on the legal outcome of the
Lafayette Park incident, except to say that, thanks to Jackie’s lawyer and the three hundred dollars I handed to him in an unmarked envelope during our one and only meeting, the
charges against me were dropped. I never had to set foot in a courtroom.
Of course, I paid back Jackie in full, and it was only later, almost in passing, that she told me of another kindness she’d done me. It seems that, without my knowing, the criminal-courts reporter for the Times-Herald had been tipped off to my situation and was set to publish a squib in the metro section. It would have had the usual identifiers—name, age, home address—for, of course, that was common practice 200
LOUIS BAYARD
in those days. Jackie kept a close vigil and, as soon as she learned something was in the works, talked her editor into spiking it. Told him I was the exact opposite of a deviant, and it would have been worse than a crime to have my name rubbing against muggers and murderers. She must have been
persuasive because nothing ever ran, and the Auchinclosses
never had to read about me over shirred eggs, and Mother’s
only response, when I finally dragged myself home Monday
afternoon, was that, if I stayed away from hot dog vendors, I wouldn’t come down with stomach flu.
As for Jack, he was none the wiser, so far as I know. I do
remember that some years later, he asked me why I always
insisted on leaving the White House by the southeast visitors’ entrance. I couldn’t tell him that the sight of Lafayette Park affected me in a particular way, so I made up some old family superstition. It’s a curious thing that, as many times as I’ve been to Washington since then, I still can’t wander by Lafayette Park.
The only person I’ve ever told about what happened is
Raul, and I immediately regretted it because he insisted on parsing the whole thing.
“So you are telling me it was all a misunderstanding,”
he said.
“Of course.”
“You went to Lafayette Park, which, as even I know, is a
place that has always attracted a certain kind of man.”
“Well, how was I to—”
“You began to make conversation with a stranger.”
“It was called being friendly.”
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He asked me then how many other men I’d been friendly
with in Lafayette Park or elsewhere. There was nothing particularly aggressive in his tone. I told him I’d had lots of friends of all types, male and female. I could neither count nor categorize them.
“Papi,” he said. “Tell me where we first met.”
“At Grand Central.”
“Why did we meet?”
“You were coming back from a trip.”
“And what were you doing?”
“Admiring the architecture.”
“Ah. Was it the ceiling you were admiring? Or the
Guastavino vaults?”
“Both.”
“You are a lover of Beaux Arts.”
“As you know.”
“And all those years ago, when you were in Lafayette
Park, you were looking at—what? Statues?”
“There was a statue, yes.”
“And it was the statue that made you stop?”
I could feel my hackles rising, one by one. “I was out for
a stroll.”
“Ah.”
“That sounds so knowing, and I don’t know what I’m
supposed to know.”
“You do know. You just won’t say.”
“Say what?”
“What and who you are. It has a name.”
Oh, I’ve told him more than once: Spare me your names.
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There’s a serious misapprehension going on in today’s culture that actions are the same as identity. The Greeks understood that a man may do many things without being simply one thing. I’ll never forget the time Raul invited me to his beloved Pride parade. Scowling lesbians, boys in crotch-high shorts, transvestites waving like Mississippi beauty queens from convertibles. They have an inalienable right to dress as they like and go where they will, but I cannot accept their acts as expressive of me. If you gave me the same number of Long Island matrons, I could commandeer a few blocks of New York once a year, and what would it signify?