David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

Finn decided. “Okay. Just let me deal with Junior.”

James continued up the stairs. As his feet disappeared from sight he called, “Don’t be too long.”

Finn put the book down, not bothering to mark his place. Truly, that turkey smelled splendid. On his way to the kitchen he picked up James’s Walkman from where he’d left it on the floor. Which story had given James the willies? Finn hit EJECT and saw it wasn’t Poe at all but just a tape tape. On the label someone had written WORKOUT MUSIC/MADONNA ETC. The writing was faded, and it wasn’t James’s.

Finn McCarthy made documentary films. Or had until six years ago, when he was looking for a place to land and was approached by the college’s Department of Communication Arts. That was the year his film about children’s street games had been nominated for an Academy Award. He’d meant to show these children (filmed in Newark, Liverpool, Mexico City and Connecticut) as members of a savage tribe with alien customs and ceremonies; it had bothered him, therefore, that two of the three reviews he’d gotten had called it “sensitive.” For whatever reason, he hadn’t been able to get going on a new project since. It was his course load, his inability to travel. It was the too-comfortable life here: dinner parties with tolerant acquaintances in a tolerant college town. It was his house, the first he’d ever owned, which had needed everything done to it. It was James.

But at long last he had a new project in mind. Which would damn well not be called “sensitive,” either. And which would get him once and for all, at the age of fifty-two, out of the closet. (James gave him guff about that, but that was just James being James.) Finn had ignored the whole Stonewall business and everything thereafter; bully for them, of course, but. He was damned if he’d be ghettoized as a quote unquote gay filmmaker; anyway, his work wasn’t political. Lately, though, he was beginning to wonder whether avoiding the subject in his films — well, not avoiding, just not obsessing — hadn’t been a mistake, esthetically. When he looked at his old work nowadays (which wasn’t often), it felt impersonal to him. Put together to a fare-thee-well, of course. Surely there was a way to get closer in without being either confessional or, God forbid, polemical. Assuming he wasn’t too old to want to.

What he’d come up with was a film about the makers of gay porn videos. Which, if it worked — if he could get the time and the funding and of course the access — would be a sort of oblique self-portrait in addition to whatever else. His films had always been about subcultures: American Indians who worked building skyscrapers, a leprosarium in what was then Southern Rhodesia, country music fans. The children and their street games. But a subculture based on being homosexual and making films: how could this not end up being his best work? Or so he sometimes thought.

He’d gone so far as to begin collecting videos; he’d also written part of a first draft of an essay on the implicit formal conventions of film pornography. If he could finish this and get it decently published — he’d try Film Quarterly first, then Sight and Sound —it might help with the funding. The biggest problem, aside from outright censorship (the Mapplethorpe business still had everybody running scared) was that these days such a subject could only be a downer: even safe-sex porn had a “Masque of the Red Death” aura. Which was all to the good as far as the film was concerned. But it made the project a tough sell, even with his Oscar nomination. Which was now a long time ago.

Another problem was that James hated the idea: it would set things back twenty years, he’d said. “What if you were a black person? Would you make a movie about welfare cheats eating watermelon in their Cadillacs?”

Finn was flattered that James thought a film of his could have any impact at all in the world. “Hell, yes,” he said. “If I could get a grant from General Motors.”

James looked at him. “It’s not funny, man. You ever stop and think about where you are ? You drive ten minutes outside this town, man, any direction, and you’re in fucking Bible country. They don’t like faggots out there, or haven’t you heard?”

“You’ve lived in New York too long,” Finn said. “I’ve never encountered the least — I mean, I don’t go to workingmen’s bars on a Saturday night , but who in his right mind does ?”

James was still looking at him. “You are so blind, man.”

Finn had never seen him this exercised. And only once before had he called him “man.” When James first moved in, he’d gone down to the city for a weekend to pick up the rest of his things, and the weekend had lasted until Thursday. When Finn had gone to get him at the airport in Albany, James’s explanation had been so carelessly thin that Finn (who’d drunk a half-carafe of vile Paul Masson red while waiting in the lounge) had called him a slut.

“Listen, man,” James had said, “this slut was good enough for you when you picked me up at the movies.”

“ I picked you up?”

“You don’t know how lucky you are,” said James. “You’re getting a live-in slut all your own, man, complete with checkered past. Just don’t push it.”

This, of course, was nonsense. Finn knew what it was to be excited by beautiful bad boys, but at his age he also knew better than to let any of them move into his home. To take a lithe, treacherous animal to bed was one thing; to wake up next to such a person was something else again. James’s good looks, in fact, had bothered Finn until he got used to them. (It humanized James a bit when Finn walked in on him spraying Right Guard into his Nikes.) In fact, after the first few days, Finn had been about to hint that it was getting time for James to go back to his sister’s house. He changed his mind the afternoon he came inside from mowing the lawn and found James in the darkened study. On the TV screen, the little black girls from Newark were jumping double Dutch. James looked up, saw Finn in the doorway, thumbed the remote and froze a little girl with her teeth bared and both feet in the air. “This is amazing,” James said. “How did you get this to be so scary?”

Finn dropped into his Zen pedagogical manner. “Just by looking at it.”

“Gol- ly, professor.” James looked back at the frozen image. “I wonder how you look at me,” he said. “I’d like to be looked at with kindness.”

“Of course, when I first saw it listed,” Byron Solomon was saying, “I was quite humiliated.”

“Why?” said Bill Whitley. “God, to be able to say you worked with John Ford.”

“ Worked? I’m afraid that flatters the case,” Byron said. “At any rate, I nearly made a great fool of myself by calling them up and lacing into them about it. Jeannette, of course, talked me around. She said, ‘Good heavens, how were they to know?’ Because naturally, for mere movies I never used ‘Byron Solomon.’ Never sullied the great name.” He laughed. It didn’t sound bitter, and Finn wondered if that was even more depressing. “So she said, ‘How were they to know, for heaven’s sake?’ You remember how she was.”

“I wish I could’ve known her,” said Bill Whitley, apparently meaning it as a tactful reminder.

“God, yes, I can hear her now,” said Finn, throwing in a chuckle to boot, though in fact the imitation had sounded more like Marie Dressler than Jeannette; Byron Solomon, after all, hadn’t been much of an actor. Bill Whitley, like the other newer faculty, tended to treat Byron as if he were senile, which was terribly unfair. True, he had slipped a bit since Jeannette died. But the man had to be sixty-five: who didn’t slip? Really, Finn should have exerted himself more to find Byron a dinner partner. But one no longer worried about pairing people off for dinners, just as one no longer worried about going boy-girl-boy-girl at table, although Finn in fact had seated Carolyn between himself and Bill Whitley, and Deborah Whitley between himself and Peter Sykes.