David Gilmour: Extraordinary

“So I went. San Miguel is a pretty town nine thousand feet up in the air with a sweeping cathedral right in the centre. Somebody in the Cucaracha bar told me it was designed entirely from a single European postcard. But people start drinking early in those towns and they kind of make stuff up. One moment it’s not true, next moment it is. No one seems to care.

“I took Chloe with me. She was twelve years old. I couldn’t leave her with Bruce. That would have been like leaving her in a black-and-white television show. Besides, she wanted to go. She was very adventurous. She could hardly wait.”

“What did Bruce say?”

“He threatened to take me to court. But I called his bluff. I wasn’t rattled by him anymore. I said, ‘Okay, Bruce, I’ll leave her up here with you.’ That scared the shit out of him. He wasn’t a mean spirit, he just didn’t want me to have my cake and eat it too. As if you’d do anything else with your cake except eat it. But the notion of a gangly, phone-hogging, incessantly hungry, expensive, operatic teenage girl running up and down the stairs with a pair of school friends really shook him up.”

“So he folded?”

“Like a deck chair. In fact, he gave me money. He pretended it was for Chloe’s expenses, but I think it was to make sure she actually went. ”

“And her brother, Kyle? Can I ask what happened there?”

Her face clouded. “You know that story,” she said softly. “I made a mistake. I was so hungry to be happy that I made a mistake.” She looked toward the window.

I said, “We don’t have—” but she went on.

“Kyle was seventeen. He wanted to stay with his friends. Besides, I didn’t want to strip Bruce of everything. I worried he’d kill himself. But I should have tried harder, I should have insisted.”

I could see her sinking into a fog of distress. I said, “Did he know about Marek?”

Sally had disappeared on me, but then returned. “Who? Kyle?”

“No, Bruce.”

“I made it clear not to wait around. It was a kindness, really. He was mooning around my yellow apartment one evening, waiting for Chloe to collect her clothes for a sleepover. I sat him down in the kitchen, I put a Scotch in his hand, and I said, ‘There’s something I want you to understand. Even if this thing with Marek Grunbaum doesn’t work out, even if it doesn’t work out with the man after him, I will never, under any circumstances, come back to you.’”

“Jesus.”

“He needed to hear it. Bruce was one of those men, you know the kind: A woman leaves them and they take on a look of wounded confusion, as if the whole thing is a kind of problème psychiatrique. A fit of madness that could, conceivably, vanish as quickly as it came on. You know how it goes: My wife went nuts, but I’m being patient. They overlook the fact that you’ve hated them for years. They overlook the fact that you’ve got a new boyfriend, lost twenty pounds, wear different clothes and have an expensive new haircut.”

“Did he believe you?”

“He looked at me with those half-closed eyes and said, ‘I’m not in any hurry.’ At which point I snapped at him. I regret it. Sort of. No, I don’t. I said, ‘For God’s sake, Bruce, you can’t jerk off for the rest of your life!’

“Chloe and I flew to Mexico City and then took a bus for a couple of hundred miles north through the desert and up into the mountains. A friend of Peter’s, Freddie Steigman, met us at the bus station. He was a native New Yorker, a pensioner, thirty-five years with Allstate Insurance. He used to be roommates with Edward Albee. Back when they were in their twenties. Albee was a poet then, apparently a very bad one. You know him?”

“The Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? guy.”

“Yeah, that’s him. When he retired, Freddie came to San Miguel for a holiday. But he fell in love with the Mexican boy who looked after the hotel swimming pool. The boy disappeared after a couple of weeks, but Freddie stayed on.”

The candle sputtered. Sally watched it for a moment, her eyes sleepy. Getting ready to leave the party.

“What was Albee like?” I asked.

She looked up from the candle flame. “Are we going to do this thing?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll stay?”

“Of course I’ll stay.”

And I thought, Nothing works out the way you think it will. And this won’t either. So I know which way it won’t work out. But the other way, the way it will, that I don’t know. How was it supposed to go again? The climb up eighteen flights of stairs, the quick walk down the hall, into the apartment. But then what? I can’t seem to recall. What did I think would come after the apartment? The next day, the next week. A year later. Five years later. Surely I must have thought about that: that the end of something isn’t necessarily the end of it. A man parts the curtains one morning and discovers an entire planet revolving just outside the window. Oh, I see.

Sally looked back at the flame, nodding. “What were we talking about?”

“Edward Albee.”

“Somebody asked Freddie about him one night when he was holding court in the Cucaracha bar. ‘If homosexuality had not existed, Albee would have invented it,’ Freddie said.” Sally smiled affectionately. “You could tell he’d said it before. Please, another Drambuie.”

In the kitchen doorway, I turned around. “I have to turn the light on now. Close your eyes.”

Settled with a brandy snifter that burned like dark gold in her hand, she continued. “Freddie Steigman dressed like a slightly down-at-the-heels salesman from the fifties. Heavy New York accent. A face part bulldog, part baseball mitt. Loved to drink. He wore a baby blue linen jacket every day of the year. He had two or three of them, identically wrinkled, and a white Mexican shirt that he kept unbuttoned almost to the waist. He reminded me of the retired history teacher in The Catcher in the Rye. Except it was endearing, it was tender, it was adorable, this old blade with a bony chest insisting he was still in the game.

“And he was. Once a month, Freddie took the bus to Mexico City, hired the prettiest boy he could find in the red light district. He paid well, never got beaten up and came back the following Monday with a light step and interested in everything. I adored him.

“Freddie knew everybody in San Miguel, and he liked knowing everyone. He got me a ground floor sublet, with an old piano somebody had left behind, a patio and a view of the mountains. When someone asked me where I lived, I’d say, ‘ Callejón de los Muertos.’ The Street of Dead Lanterns. I loved how it rolled off my tongue. Three weeks after my arrival, Freddie threw a party for me.

“The events that day haven’t lost a drop of colour. They’re vivid the way the world looks when you suddenly surface after swimming underwater. I must have been paying a certain kind of attention. Why, I don’t know. Unless you believe that stuff. I’ve been over these details a million times. Because if I had done anything differently, if I had taken this street instead of that street, if I’d lingered over the lines in the fruit stall a few moments longer, then what happened would not have happened. It’s like watching Romeo and Juliet : even though you know the story backwards, you keep hoping that this time the Friar will get the letter to Romeo.

“I took a morning sketch class at the Institute. We were drawing a bare-breasted Mexican girl with a beauty spot on her right shoulder. She had a gap between her front teeth and you could see by the way she smiled that she was shy about it. After the class, some of the students, mostly women, stayed on to talk to the instructor, a Frenchman who smoked Gauloises through an absurdly long cigarette filter. But I had things to do. I bought fruit for the party in the mercado and then I met Jan Trober for a coffee at the Cucaracha. She was a New York actress who had settled in San Miguel after the bottom fell out of her career and her husband left her. We sat at a table on the sidewalk so we could see all the people in the town square. The boys walking in a circle one way, girls walking in a circle the other; everybody eyeing each other. Beautiful in its way, the way life works like that.”