The Music of Your Life (12 page)

He lifts his fingers up to my mouth and takes the cigarette away, and stubs it out in the ashtray.

“Jeez … look at you … you're getting so tough. 'Bama Boy is growing up.”

“Yeah, that's right, he is,” I say back. “'Bama Boy is growing up. What's it to you?”

“Oh, Christ, you're too much,” he says, sliding over to his side of the bed. “Go to sleep.”

“Maybe I will, maybe I won't. Good night to you too.”

He turns over and looks at me. “Hey, Willie … who loves you?” he whispers, and it always makes me smile when he says that, even if I'm ticked off. Usually, I don't answer him, I just let the words hang there in the air for a second or two. He probably doesn't think I appreciate it enough, that he says that to me, and maybe I don't, or maybe I just don't show it, but inside I really am glad he keeps saying it. I'm more glad for this than for anything else, if I'm being honest. And then he sings his own words to the
Lucy
tune, which is so corny, even I can see that, and I'm from the damn sticks.

“I love Willie, and he loves me, we're as happy as we can be …” he sings in my ear.

“Don't quit your day job,” I say, rolling my eyes.

But then he can't resist la-la'ing one more chorus of the
Lucy
song into my ear, real quiet and hushed, like a lullaby—a Hollywood lullaby: “I love Willie, and he loves me …”

And just before I drift off, I whisper to him: “That'll never play in the valley,” and then I'm all the way out, on the way to dreaming, as I do every night, about the movies.

CONNECTICUT, 1993

The phone rings in the back of the shop, right in the middle of my increasingly futile attempt to persuade Claire Tillinghast and her daughter Marcy to choose coneflowers and freesia instead of daffodils and asters for Marcy's bridesmaids' bouquets. Already, they are in the throes of High Panic, and the wedding is nine months away. I should be used to brides and their mothers by now; but, then, how do you ever get used to the sight of silly rich people working themselves into a frenzy over an altar arrangement? The phone rings again.

“Excuse me, ladies.”

They continue to sort through the catalogs, and I close my office door.

“Old Lyme Flower and Foliage,” I say into the receiver, a phrase that comes as natural to me as breathing.

“Uncle Will?”

“Well, well, Mr. Toby. How are you?”

“I'm good. Is this a bad time?”

“No. As a matter of fact, it's the perfect time. I was in bride and mother-of-the-bride hell, and here you are, come along to rescue me. You've heard me rant about the Tillinghasts.”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “You and those crazy Connecticut WASPs. Listen, I was wondering if … if it's convenient and you're not busy, if I could come up this weekend? I really need to get out of the city, and I … well, actually I have a new … I've been kind of seeing this guy, you know, kind of a new guy and all, and …”

“Oh. And?” My nephew is the most lovable boy in the world, and the most transparent.

“And … I kind of told him about the Lucy thing. And he'd like to see it. Don't hate me.”

I close my eyes and suppress an exasperated sigh. “Oh, Toby. I'd love to have you, but must we do that? You've seen it a million times. Tell your friend he can rent it in any video store in Manhattan.”

In the other room, I hear Marcy shriek: “Oh God, Mother!
Orchids?!
”

“Gee, thanks,” Toby says quietly, and immediately I realize what a jerk I've been.
Jerk!
I'd forgotten how much of a kick he gets out of that damn thing. As I start to formulate some kind of apology, Toby graciously picks up the slack. “I want him to meet you,” he says. “It isn't just about the video.”

“Oh, Toby, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. Forgive me? Please?”

“Of course. So can we come?”

“Yes, and I'll cook. Pasta, lamb, sun-dried anything, whatever you want.” He starts to protest, politely, so I cut him off. “No, no, I was an ass, so now I have to make amends.” I know this child so well, I can actually
hear
him smiling on the other end. “How's Saturday?”

“Brett
hates
pink, Mother!” moans Marcy in the other room.

“William,
please
help!” Claire calls out to me. “You have to help me with my imposs ible child!”

“Saturday's perfect. His name is Ethan, by the way.”

“I'll look forward to it. Come up anytime in the afternoon.”

“Thank you, Auntie Mame,” he says, and then adds: “Your little Patrick loves you, you know.”

After dinner—a Southern meal of ham, potatoes, and black-eyed peas, Toby's suggestion—the three of us retire to my combination glassed-in sunporch and TV room for our mini film festival.

With Toby's and my permission, Ethan, the dear boy, has been given the right to commandeer the VCR's remote control for the evening. Toby and I don't need to stop the tape over and over to look for me, to try and figure out if it's really me, to try and see how I've aged, or depreciated, or whatever forty years has done to me. We both know. The fun, I suppose, is in seeing a new person get clued in to the old joke. That's the subtitle to tonight's screening: Old Lyme,
Old Joke, New Face
.

And, oh, what a nice new face it is. Toby hadn't elaborated; either he didn't want to boast, or he didn't want his old uncle to get too excited at the prospect of his handsome new boyfriend coming to spend the weekend in Connecticut. The boys—I say boys, my God, Toby's getting near to thirty, though I surmise Ethan is somewhat younger—are sitting close together on the couch; Toby holds the hand Ethan isn't using to freeze-frame. I'm watching from my recliner (a very un-gay-like piece of furniture, I'm told by my
au courant
friends who know these things, but I say: I'm old, it's comfortable, fuck 'em).

Just as in any proper screening room, the only light comes from the screen itself. The black-and-white illumination from my big Trinitron set flickers across their faces in the darkness. I confess that I no longer enjoy watching these old things—it makes me feel a little like Norma Desmond holed up on Sunset Boulevard—but I never seem able to say no to Toby when he calls up with a new reason for wanting to watch it again in my presence. I believe he uses the fact of my years in Hollywood, especially the Lucy episode, as a little cachet to impress new or potentially new boyfriends, which I actually find rather sweet, though he certainly doesn't need me to impress or attract other people. This is the third boyfriend for whom the two of us have screened “Lucy Gets in Pictures,” always here on the sunporch, always in the same configuration: the two of them sitting together on the couch, me sitting alone in my chair, watching them watch the TV. Oh, I worry about Toby; God bless him, he's had trouble keeping the beaux. It runs in the family, I suppose.

He keeps looking over at me to see if I'm OK with this. All we have to do is meet each other's glance to understand what the other wants to communicate. It's been that way with us ever since he was a child. I should have known then that he would turn out to be gay. Actually, I must have known instinctually all along; I was giving him books of poetry when he was five and six,
A Child's Walt Whitman, A Garden Verse of Emily Dickinson
, which he loved, and then later, for Christmas, bestowing him with signed 8 x 10 glossies of stars I knew, or had known briefly—he would always frame them meticulously for the wall of his room. I finally got it, slowpoke that I am, when, for his twelfth birthday, he asked me for the cast albums of
Company and Follies
.

While he was in college, he finally confessed his sexual preference to me, and I, of course, in turn told him all about myself. Toby was the first person in my family I ever confided in, face to face, though I'm sure most of them had figured things out by then, whether they accepted me or not. And Toby had made it easy for me; he was the brave one, he said it first. All I had to do was say back to him: “Me too.” We cried, hugged, laughed; then we traded stories about Cousin Starla Scott and what Toby called her “Legacy of Tackiness.”

“Oh … My … God,” Ethan says very deliberately, sounding almost as though he has rehearsed the response. He is transfixed by what he's watching: a bunch of leggy showgirls on a set of stairs, and one funny redhead falling all over them. Toby pointed me out immediately to Ethan as soon as the scene began—]second girl from the top, upper right-hand corner. “This is so awesome. I can't believe it.”

“Yeah, well,” I say, because after the scads of gay men who have been let in on this little secret and have watched this episode in my presence, I can no longer muster up the energy to voice even the old standby responses. “There you have it.”

“You were a great-looking showgirl, Mr. Ford,” Ethan continues, and I see Toby looking at him, expectantly. I understand the difficult position Toby's in: He wants me to like Ethan, he wants Ethan to like me, and he knows there's a chance that might not happen in either direction. The Auntie Mame curse!

Ethan turns to study me. He has intense blue eyes and a blond buzz cut, and three small gold studs in his right ear—probably a tiny little revolt against his über-WASP Greenwich upbringing. (We even discovered over dinner that he went to college in Hartford with Marcy Tillinghast. “Connecticut is
such
a small state,” he offered, as though he were saying something original; his forced “acid” tones sounded more rehearsed than spontaneous. He seemed more honest when he added: “And Marcy—what a Neanderthal bitch!” which, though it's true, I still found rather unmannerly, and not, I surmise, the type of dinner conversation his Greenwich parents would approve of.)

Toby eyes our exchange tightly, though he knows I'd never be less than gentlemanly to his friend. It's probably Ethan being ungentlemanlike to me that he's more worried about.
Relax, Toby
.

“I'm thinking …” Ethan says, in a faux-scholarly tone that I'm sure he doesn't think is faux at all, “that you were probably a very, very attractive man when you were that age.” I throw Ethan an unchecked look of daggers, which Toby also happens to catch. There's a palpable moment of frozen silence, so Ethan immediately begins to sputter: “I mean,” he says quickly, in what is decidedly not the scholarly tone, “that you probably had your pick of any man in Hollywood. I mean, not that you still wouldn't, you know … um …”

It's like watching someone drowning, and you choose not to save them.

“
Ethan
,” Toby says in a low and embarrassed voice. What I feel most keenly is not the pinprick from Ethan's implication that I'm a has-been in the looks department, but Toby's disappointment in Ethan's own pompous lack of manners.

“Well, I think I did all right in my time, as I recall,” I say.

I'm pretty sure I see Toby kick Ethan's foot. But then they giggle together, and Ethan gives Toby a spontaneous kiss, and then suddenly, the room becomes their room; they have seized a private moment, forgetting that I'm still here. I glance away, feeling like an onlooker in my own home.

“Well, I think you're still very attractive, Mr. Ford,” Ethan says, after they break, words tumbling unmonitored from his dimpled mouth, “it's just that you made such a … well, pretty woman.”

“Thank you, Ethan. I think.”

“He went out with Rock Hudson,” says Toby, and I wince inwardly when he brings this up, though I realize he's probably said it to come to my defense.

“Oh … My … God. Is that actually true?” says Ethan, back in his studied manner again.

“It was one date. Well, two. Really, Toby, you know it wasn't that big of a deal, and it was … please, it was thirty years ago.”

“I'm
extremely
curious about that, Mr. Ford,” Ethan says.

“I'm sure you are,” says Toby, a hint of warning in his voice. “And you can call him Will.”

“Yes, please do, Ethan. I really don't want to play the chaperone.”

Ethan rewinds the tape so that we can watch Lucy falling down for the one hundred millionth time.

“What a genius she was,” Ethan says, and I suppress an urge to roll my eyes upward. “I really believe she was, like, the Sarah Bernhardt of American television.”

“What exactly is it that you do again, Ethan?” I say, though my hunger for this particular piece of knowledge isn't exactly overwhelming.

“Well,” he says. “I'm in film school at NYU. Second year. I thought I had mentioned that. Anyway, you can see why I'm so interested in all of this.”

“Film school. Of course.”

“That's funny,” says Toby in a tone that sounds only half kidding. “I thought you were interested in this because it had something to do with me.” And he playfully takes a swipe at Ethan's blond head, which, now that I look at it, I realize is kind of bullet shaped, not traditionally pretty-boy perfect. Good. He needed humanizing.