Leon Uris - A God In Ruins

madness in the increasingly strong gay community and women’s lib, she

had said she had not had sex, which was virtu * *

ally true, but the dancing until four, the party refreshments and the speeded-up scene .. . the vastness of the New York Public Library, the height of the Empire State, the whiz of graffitied subways. One night dancing, one night maudlin. She didn’t let on about the staggering pain of his loss.

Whatever! Greer Little did not go unnoticed anywhere!

Quick, she said to herself at Quinn’s apartment, before he arrives from Troublesome. She opened the first of two suitcases. Out came a trapeze to hook over the beams above the mattress in the nook. A whip, but mercifully covered in velvet, handcuffs, and .. . candles: big candles, little candles, smelly candles, floating candles, Christian candles, Jewish candles. There were enough undergarments to outfit a small chorus line—or a chorus line of small women. The balance of the suitcase held a variety of adult toys.

The second case held the artist’s paraphernalia. Greer undressed and stood before the bathroom mirror. First on went an orange-colored wig; then she painted her face down the middle, violet on the left side and orange on the right. She encircled her breasts with a swath of green on the right breast and red on the left.

“Bottoms, bottoms,” she said to herself. White thigh boots. Now, let’s see, here we go. Across her midsection she painted the words and spread sparkles on it, reading: PRAISE THE LORD.

Greer heard a car parking outside. Holy moly—not a second to spare. She caught her breath and stood a few feet back, so he would have to get full sight of her.

A knock on the door. “Use your keys, I’ve got my hands full,” she called.

The key was tight from its summer’s rest. Finally, the door popped open.

“Fuck me, man!” Greer cried, holding arms and legs spread eagled.

A number of beats of silence were required for everyone to get rearranged. Siobhan held a pair of shopping bags.

“Excuse me,” Siobhan said, “I was looking for the brothel. I’ll try down the hall.”

“Mrs. O’Connell?”

“Yes, lovely meeting you in person at last.”

“Oh, God!”

Siobhan set the bags down and went to the kitchen cabinet. “I think I need a drink,” she said, and belted down some Lemon Hart before Greer could stop her, staggered to the kitchen table as Greer pumped several glasses of water into her.

Suddenly, they looked at one another and burst out laughing and replayed the grand entrance and went hysterical.

“Thank God Dan wasn’t here!” Siobhan screamed. “Or Maldonado!”

“Or Maldonado’s daughter!”

“Or Father Scan!”

“Or the dean of admissions!”

“You weren’t exactly expecting this, were you, ma’am?”

Greer was up front with Siobhan. She and Quinn were classical sad ships passing in the night.

“Fifteen weeks is a long time, Greer. Life isn’t going to stop, a million things can happen.”

“You want me to go back to New York?”

“You’re going back,” Siobhan said. “I just don’t know how it would work if Quinn followed you there. When we traveled together looking for colleges, New York lit him up for the moment, but he’s not a lit-up man. I’m glad he knows there is a New York. I’m glad we are able to keep him studying. He’s not heading for oblivion, and he’s not a loser. But unlike you, he does not know what he needs.”

“He knows. He desperately wants to find his roots. No one other than

Quinn can control that hunger. Listen to me, Siobhan, maybe I’m the

only one who has understood his intensity. He wants peace, which I

could never give him. He wants, how do I say it, the man wants to make things better for every living thing.”

“Will you stay for a year?” Siobhan asked.

“A year is a long time. I’m a pretty crazy number to nail down.”

Having gathered the bazooka, washboard, bones, Jew’s harp, kazoo, and four horn brass band, Quinn burst in with | them playing, “Don’t Roll Them Bloodshot Eyes at Me.”

*

BOULDER, 1971

Greer Little was a lover whose mind never strayed far from the scene. All the power pieces concealed in Quinn responded fivefold. Their open boldness of speaking out and then usually acting it out was astonishing.

It got so that the mere touching of one another while walking past each other could set off a conflagration. As apprehensions faded to trust, a cool sweetness settled over them. Time, thank God, stood still. The inevitable parting at the end of a year seemed far away, way down the runway.

When out of kissing distance, they rushed back together. And the humor was salty, raunchy, and very high. Neither of them were out to make the dean’s list but read voraciously when too exhausted to make love. They learned what their schools could give them, mostly learned on the queen-size mattress in the nook, where she went to read, with the kitchen chair for himself.

Once a week was party time. The place overflowed with happy, frustrated, angry, bewildered, and scared campus kids. Drugs were minimal, not so sex. It was the kind of campus where Nixon’s visit to China might get as much discussion as a new psychedelic drug. Oh, if they only had something going like Quinn and Greer.

Little bits at a time, Greer felt all right about giving him little pieces of New York. She did not want him to think she was heading back to some kind of subway or Central Park murder. She understood that Quinn was only partly interested in their trips on the wild side, and this gave her a sense of peace that the city was just not his thing. She’d often think, “We met in the wrong century, darling, but praise the Lord, we stopped and went a little way, hand in hand.”

During the past summer, Greer had cruised the scum holes of Eighth Avenue, purchasing books and magazines and checking out the porn films. The New York Public Library offered another trove. Crossing out and combining, she came up with a list of a hundred and six ways for them to make love.

“Done that, done that,” Quinn said, reading the list. “So, what’s new?”

“Us. Keep reading.”

“What! You found this in the New York Library?”

“In the same section with Mary Poppins.”

“You didn’t get this at the library. You have a fertile and diseased mind.”

“That’s beautiful, Quinn. You make a girl cry.”

Sometimes they smoked a joint, mostly at parties. Quinn felt he was in control, and she went wild with lust. The best times were three in the morning, waking up drowsy, downing a big glass of o.j. and having a few tokes on the bongo.

Quinn set the drug limit. After seeing two men on the team smash up on LSD and coke, he drew a line. She broke the rule once with cocaine, and he moved out for two weeks until she swore, and kept her promise of, no more coke. “Coke is the devil, baby. The devil is at his smartest when you don’t believe there’s a devil. Chrissake, when you were cruising Eighth Avenue, didn’t you see what it did? How about coke at work?”

“Yeah, some girls and fellows at the studio really busted themselves up. Thank God, I’ve got you.”

The honey kisses—passing a syrupy ice cube into each other’s mouth and letting it melt and run down their necks and licking it off. Daring, risking, they opened each other up entirely.

The touch, the touch, the touch. That’s all it took as a forerunner to a full night’s journey or a quick leap off the pier. They read each other perfectly.

After a few visits to the ranch Dan softened considerably. Siobhan’s usual loveliness was always tempered by the hidden fear that Greer might not return to New York. These two kids were filling up huge storage tanks for a lifetime, for a hundred and twenty years.