A Shock to the System - Stevenson Richard - Страница 22

"That nicely sums up the hopelessly paradoxical nature of the situation, Timothy. Thank you."

"So which is it? Not to be overly pushy, but I guess now you have to go one way or the other."

"Not yet," I said. "I don't know enough yet. There's been so much evasiveness and dissimulation by all the parties in this

whole affair that I'm sure there's a larger picture I'm not seeing and that's critical to my understanding the little I do know— about Paul Haig's death, and Larry Bierly's shooting, and Crockwell's fear and his odd attempts to hire me, of all people, and Phyllis Haig's attempts to blame her son's death on Bierly, and— Steven St. James. How is St. James connected to Bierly and Haig and, apparently, Crockwell? And what about Moody and Stover, the violent homophobes in the therapy group? There's just too much I need to know before I can be sure which way to head, and in whose employ."

"It sounds as if you should have a staff of fifty investigators working on this," Timmy said. "I hope it doesn't take you six months to sort it out."

"It could be time-consuming, I guess. But I'll take it one day at a time. I mustn't let myself become a slave to the temporal realm."

"True, true, but the mortgage is due on the first of June. Keep that in mind, will you?"

It was hell loving a man who got all his values from dead white European males, but to have done such was my complex destiny.

12

I saw no single men seated either at the bar or in the dining room of Would You Like to Take a Wok. But a male-female couple at a rear table seemed to be waiting for someone, and when they saw me peering quizzically, the man got up and came my way.

"Would you be looking for Gene Cebulka?"

"Yes, I'm Don Strachey."

"Glad to meet you. I brought my wife along. I hope that's okay."

"Sure, that's up to you."

He was a well-scrubbed, ruddy-faced man in his late twenties in crisply laundered khakis and a pale pink polo shirt that matched the restaurant linen. He had a broad grin and a country-boy lope, and he could have passed for a soda-fountain boy on a Saturday Evening Post cover from 1952 had it not been for his ravaged head. Cebulka's honey-colored hair was thick in spots but in others it was missing altogether. This was a result not of disease, it soon became apparent, but of Cebulka's habit of absently tugging at clumps of his hair as he spoke. This seemingly pleasant young man with a look and demeanor as wholesome as any I'd run into in recent decades was, clump by clump, pulling his hair out by the roots.

"And this is my wife, Tracy," Cebulka said, smiling, as he twisted and tugged at his head. "Tracy, this is Mr. Strachey."

"Don. Nice to meet you, Tracy."

She was freckled and pretty and slight under a mainsail of

permed hair broad enough to launch a brigantine. She looked scared to death of me, but squeaked out, "Hi."

"Tracy thought if I was going to meet a good-looking man in a restaurant, she better come along and keep an eye on me," Cebulka joked, but Tracy just looked embarrassed. I probably did too.

Then it was my turn to put my foot in it. "So, how long have you honeymooners been married? Six months? Six weeks?"

"Eleven years," Tracy said sadly.

"Oh. So—you were already married then, Gene, when you went into Vernon Crockwell's program. I'd have guessed you were younger."

"I'm twenty-eight," he said, "and Tracy's twenty-seven."

"Ah."

"I just figured," Cebulka said brightly, "that I better get my ducks in a row before Tracy and I started a family. If you catch my meaning." He winked.

I was about to come up blank but was saved by the waiter, who arrived with red-tassled menus the size of the gates to Nanking. The three of us set about studying these and after a time summoned the waiter and placed our order for an assortment of multicolored edibles in cornstarch. Tracy Cebulka glanced at me nervously, and Gene smiled and twisted his hair.

When the waiter was gone, I said, "Gene, I guess your experience with Vernon Crockwell's program was a happy one. And it achieved the outcome you desired."

"That's true," he said, his fingers busy above. "I used to be turned on by men, but that was strictly no-win. I had a chance to be straightened out, so to speak, and I availed myself of the opportunity. Fortunately, Dr. Crockwell's way did the trick."

"Now Gene plays Softball with the guys," Tracy said.

This was followed by another silence. After a moment, I said, "It's hard to argue with success."

They both looked at me, Tracy unmoving, Gene twisting away at a recalcitrant clump.

"Although," I said, "Crockwell's therapy apparently doesn't do

the trick for everybody. Paul Haig and Larry Bierly, for instance. Their departure from the group was a bitter one, I'm told."

"I saw on the news Larry was in a shooting," Cebulka said. "I hope he's going to pull through. That's a terrible tragedy after Paul passing away and all."

I said it looked as if Bierly was going to be okay.

"I'm glad," Cebulka said. "Larry's sincere in his beliefs. I guess he turned into a kind of gay libber, didn't he?"

"Kind of."

"I'm broad-minded. If that's what makes a person happy, I say, hey, go for it. But going with guys never made me happy. It just made me feel guilty as heck."

"Gene used to come home late at night from Albany and just sit out on the porch feeling like a total asshole," Tracy said. "Even if it was ten below."

"Now I never go to Albany at all anymore," Cebulka said. "I don't need to. I haven't set foot in the place for—it'll be seven months next Wednesday."

"He's turned into a real stay-at-home," Tracy said. "Which I happen to like."

"A real couch potato," Cebulka said with a laugh.

"Of course, it would be nice if he got off the couch once in a while too," Tracy said, her hopeful look fading. "Especially like not falling asleep downstairs every single solitary night of the week."

"I'm hooked on Jay Leno," Cebulka said with a sheepish grin. "What can I tell you? Jay just cracks me up."

More silence. Then I said, "But tell me, Gene. Back when you were still in the group, I've gotten the impression that things didn't always go so smoothly for everybody. That there was a certain amount of tension and conflict."

"Well, naturally there was going to be," Cebulka said. "Here we were, dealing with a lot of heavy-duty stuff from our formative years. Deformative years, in our cases. Since homosexuals don't bond with their fathers normatively, they have to learn later on how to bond with other men in a normal way. That's what we

were trying to do all the time, and it was no Sunday-school picnic, believe you me. It was hard work, and we were all working a double shift—getting rid of our old habits of trying to get into guys' pants and practicing at the same time how to be a buddy and a pal and—you know—getting in touch with our true guy-ness. People would blow off steam sometimes, which is understandable. Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it can be a dickens of a time getting it back in."

They both looked at me. Cebulka had a tight grip on a knot of hair and was working it loose.

I said, "Gene, when you heard about Paul Haig's suicide, did it surprise you?"

"No," he said without hesitation. "I was sad to hear it, but it didn't really surprise me."