Allan Stein. Matthew Stadler

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СКАЧАТЬ would be safe. Entire prewar collections of sodomite erotica would flood the museum.”

      “I suppose he could worm his way into the confidence of some old widower.”

      “Mmm.”

      “Or the family of a rich industrialist.”

      “Mmm, fawning over the crayon scrawls of the twelve-year-old Scotch-tape heiress.”

      “The Infanta.”

      “Or her brother.”

      I said nothing, just stared at Herbert; maybe I lifted my eyebrow slightly.

      Herbert took this silence as some kind of arch comment, an insight so enormous I could not deign to constrain it inside a few miserable words, so that while I was thinking nothing he believed I was thinking everything. He stared and bristled, then grinned at me and stammered, “No.” Herbert often uttered this single word when he had stumbled across something he dearly hoped was true.

      “Yes,” was my obligatory reply. If I’d had my drink I would have sipped from it, but the drinks were still unmade.

      “No.” We searched the room for Tristan, but he was nowhere in sight.

      “Probably.” Someone kept tapping at the window with an umbrella, an older woman in Gore-Tex balaclava and rain parka, beckoning to her mukluked companion (parked at a table behind me) who responded in mime, Come in come in. Why should no one in the bar be allowed to hear the halfhearted invitation she was so obviously mouthing? Her friend shuffled to the doorway and brought half the afternoon’s storm in with her, rain and leaves and lightning and such adhering to her billowing yards of weatherproof fabric. Herbert and I ducked down beneath curtain level and continued with our speculations. “Yes. He prefers boys, you can tell.”

      “No, I can’t tell, which is what is so agonizing. He hasn’t given me a clue one way or another.”

      “That is exactly what I mean. It’s an obvious sign.”

      “You mean his failure to put me off?”

      “No. He’s put you off repeatedly. He puts you off every time we come in here.”

      “No.”

      “Yes. He just never does it by mentioning girlfriends or all that. If he was—you know—‘normal,’ he would have said so ages ago. He obviously likes boys.”

      “But he finds me repulsive?”

      “An old, leering drunk.”

      “No.”

      “Yes.”

      “But he’s always so chatty, serving the drinks and taking the tip and all.”

      “He’s the waiter.”

      “Well, sometimes when I come in alone, I mean without you, in midafternoon when it’s not very busy and poor Tristan isn’t bombarded with all this work, he has gotten very, very flirty with me.”

      “Mmm.” Suddenly he was at our table.

      We looked up as this blessed angel lifted our drinks from his tray. (A small twinge here tells me it is demeaning and wrong to have condemned anyone, even one so incidental as our waiter, Tristan—though let me point out that he later, in fact, became Herbert’s intern, excelled at courting collectors of all persuasions, was hired away by a famous art center in Minneapolis and then a museum in New York, where he has now become the golden boy of contemporary art curating, exactly as Herbert predicted and despite being just as stupid and poorly educated as I had suspected he was, a fitting poster child for America’s fantastically undiscriminating upward mobility, where anyone with minimal beauty, a pleasing ignorance, and initiative can rise to any height—to condemn him, that is to say, to the tired idealizations of romantics and colonialists [angels, sylphs, savages, and the like], such as have been routinely inflicted on women and other exotics, like children. Too bad. Herbert and I gave Tristan a gift when we elevated him to such heights, especially considering that the alternative was a life of dull, respectful sobriety and caution so boring we all might as well have been dead.)

      “Scotch neat,” our servile Eros mumbled as he set Herbert’s drink in front of him.

      “The usual,” Herbert answered brightly, smiling at the boy.

      “Uh-huh, whatever. And a gin and tonic here for your, uh, partner in crime.” This absentminded aside sent a jolt of electricity through both of us, lifting Herbert’s eyebrows as he stared at me across the drinks, silent, until the boy wandered off with his enormous tip (40 or 50 percent, whatever change was left on the tray).

      “Partner in crime, did you hear that?” Herbert asked rhetorically, because of course I’d heard it. It was all either of us had heard. “He is such a tease.”

      “He probably thinks we’re boyfriends.”

      “Don’t be idiotic.”

      Tristan shuffled out of view—my view, in any case. Herbert kept his marksman’s stare fixed just to the right of my face, beyond which the boy, to judge by the sound of what I could not see, was adjudicating a dispute between the two lady customers (one still unwrapping) and a wonderfully tall Nigerian “croupier” who, in the lilting British tones of a public-school boy, had ridiculed the ladies’ objections to “an awful lot of indoor smoking.” Shackles routinely allowed what state law evidently forbade. Tristan offered them a table near to ours (no smoke here), still behind me, and they took it. I could feel the weather arriving with the coats. I slouched a little closer to my drink so Herbert could see better.

      “I wasn’t being idiotic. We certainly look as though we’re married.”

      “Mmm, that’s a thought, not a pretty one.” Herbert sipped his drink and continued his surveillence.

      “You’re handsome. Everyone says so.” This drew a brief glance and a smile.

      “Well, it’s not true. I look like a doll whose head has been chewed on by a rat.” In fact the description was a good one. “‘Gnawed Doll’s Head,’ like some sort of Swedish porn star. You look that way too.”

      “Hmm, really?”

      “Yes. Hank says we’re practically identical. We would have handsome children, all sculpted and chewed upon.”

      “Would you have sex with our son?” I asked. “I mean, if we had one?” Herbert grimaced, as though his drink were bad. Tristan appeared beside us, and the grimace became a leering, amplified smile.

      “We were just discussing you,” Herbert announced, ignoring my question. “I mean the work you’ll be doing for the museum.”

      “Hmm.” Tristan might have been amused. At the very least he was cheerful.

      “It looks fairly certain I can get you credit for that Stein project.”

      “Oh, right, the Stein project.” Tristan squatted by our table and smiled. (I know for a fact Herbert was making this up. Tristan had been carrying a copy of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives one СКАЧАТЬ