“Then why aren’t the ghosts seen in drag?” he asked. Scott was a no-nonsense sort of man. There was a logical explanation for everything. He saw nothing spooky about a squeaky door, for instance; it only needed to be oiled. (And he had all the husbandry skills our hosts lacked, a talent that resulted in our frequent weekend invitations to the country and Scott being peppered for handyman advice.)

  “Technically, it would have only been one in drag, not both of them,” I answered him. “And it would have only been occasionally, not a daily thing, especially since I doubt that there were a lot of prison dances or that Emma Altemus would not have noted that one of the men was dressed as a woman. So they appear the way they lived and died—soldiers embracing as lovers.”

  “They were probably embracing because it was cold,” Scott said. “You’ve been reading too many gay books,” he said. “Not everyone in the world is gay.”

  Though Scott was often amused by my anecdotes of gay history, he believed that I saw life from a narrow gay perspective. I worked as an editor for a gay news service that syndicated stories to gay newspapers, gay bar rags, gay blogs, and gay websites, and I enjoyed looking for historical precedents of current news items that I was reporting on. Scott never took my job seriously because in his estimation I didn’t make a serious income from my gay work, certainly nowhere near his non-gay six figures. I believed that Scott diminished his homosexuality, hiding its existence as if he were ashamed of it. Scott was only out to a small circle of gay friends. Neither his ex-wife, his two children, nor his coworkers at the bank knew about our relationship, nor did Scott expect to change this arrangement anytime soon with new disclosures—a continual source of irritation between the two of us, because I always felt that he undervalued our relationship in comparison to those he had had with his girlfriends and his wife.

  “Peter could have written Emma a letter about what it was like at the balls,” I said, not ready to drop our little discussion or let Scott think he was off the hook. “Dear Emma, the privates of our brigade had a ball last night,” I began, reciting an imaginary letter. “Some of the boys got themselves up in ladies clothes and were right pretty. A few of them even looked good enough to know better and I guess some of them did get things on with each other. I know I slept with my favorite pretty one. He kept me warm all through the night.”

  Scott arched an eyebrow at me as if I were the queerest man he had ever met. “Maybe you should direct your imagination toward solving global warming,” he said. “The planet really needs someone like you to step up to the plate and make things better for everyone.”

  Scott and I were close to breaking up the weekend of Arnie and Mitch’s Independence Day party. The arguing had started the day before our drive to the country when Scott had introduced me as “a friend” to one of his coworkers we had run into at a restaurant near Times Square. We had spent the night together in the city at my apartment discussing the pros and cons of coming out. (Scott felt that he would be discriminated against at work; I felt that I was being discriminated against at home.) On the drive to the country the next morning, we had reached an icy stalemate and had managed to avoid each other during the barbecue alongside Arnie and Mitch’s new pool, talking with the other weekend guests—mostly a couple who had driven up from Washington, a closeted lobbyist and his very out and flamboyant boyfriend.

  That evening Scott and I spent the night upstairs in “Emma’s bedroom,” avoiding any intimacy. (Sex was the primary thing that kept us together—usually we couldn’t keep our hands off each other, but that night we slept at opposite ends of the large king-sized bed, deliberately shunning each other.)

  The next morning the chill remained between us; the sky grew gray with thick, dark rain clouds; and fearing that we would all be trapped with one another in the country house because of the miserable weather, Arnie proposed an outing to the nearby movie theater, purposely to prevent his guests from escaping to the city early and leaving him alone with Mitch.

  Scott wasn’t interested in seeing the movie—a romantic comedy—and decided to stay behind, saying that he needed the time to prepare for an office meeting on Monday morning. In his own way, Scott was as high maintenance as our hosts. He always traveled with a cell phone, a Blackberry, a laptop, an iPod, and a thin briefcase full of thick files. I didn’t protest or plead for him to join us on the outing to the movie, thinking he was hitting the last nail in the coffin of our relationship. Before we left the house, Scott had spread out his papers on the small café table that was beside the giant hearth, flipped open his laptop, and was contentedly at work, oblivious to the rest of us scrambling for parkas, caps, and umbrellas.

  It was raining when we left the house and, during the course of our movie, the sky blackened and the rain came down harder. Back at the house, Scott abandoned his work at the table for short intervals to stand in front of the windows and look out at the sloping countryside and the water puddling on the stone path that led to the kitchen door. Alone, he was attuned now to all of the old house’s quirky noises and motions—the tapping of the rain, the wind blowing sheets of water against the window, the creaking floorboards in the kitchen as he shifted his weight, the muffled, wet swinging chimes by the door. Scott was not a superstitious man and his practical mind was as far from wondering about the ghosts as it could be. He was thinking of the power of the rain, the solidity of the structure of the old house, how much it would cost him to put a down payment on a similar place, how he would redecorate it if he were its owner—how he would reorganize the kitchen counters and change the configurations of the guest rooms. Somewhere in there he imagined himself the resident owner and in that imagination he saw me as his partner in the kitchen cooking, reaching for a mixing bowl to make pancakes (his morning favorite) or experimenting with the color of margaritas (my favorite).

  He returned to the table and his reading material and became absorbed in his work. Outside the sky darkened more, the rain continued, and Scott worked away. Upstairs a door in the house closed with a violent shudder, obviously pulled shut by the wind of the storm coming inside the house, and Scott was forced to look away from his laptop for a few seconds. Next, the overhead light in the kitchen sputtered and went black, and the laptop on the table slipped into the auxiliary power of its battery. Outside flashes of lightning flickered and a burst of thunder was so sudden and fierce Scott felt the table vibrate. He waited in the darkness for the power to be restored, for the lights to flicker and resume burning brightly, but when there was a dark quiet for several seconds, he sighed, then began to take note of where he was in his work, saving the documents open on his laptop. The kitchen was as black as night, the rain hammering the shingles of the roof and sliding down the gutters and windows and stones. For a moment he wondered where the circuit breaker was located in the house and realizing he didn’t know, he folded his arms and sat back in his chair and waited a few minutes till the rain suddenly stopped and the black clouds blew away and the sun began to break through the darkness.

  Light broke across a page of his notes first—bright and yellowish as if the morning had just arrived. The light widened over the table, then moved up his arms and chest and across his shoulders. For a moment he was conscious of the warmth of the sun and he squinted to adjust his eyesight to the fast rising light in the kitchen. The sunlight was accompanied by a strange burning smell—like that of wet wood and scorched hair—and Scott lifted his eyes away from the table to make sure that nothing was cooking on the stove top. Immediately, he felt a change in the kitchen and within himself and he knew he would see the ghosts before they had even appeared.

  The trail of blood appeared first—initially as a crimson light against the wooden floor, then thickening and darkening into a river of red. His eyes searched out the edges of the red liquid, then followed it back across the room to where he sat by the hearth, and the deep red covered his legs and shoes. His heart was beating faster but he was not frightened or panicking. He was awestruck, in fact, as if he were watching a common phenomenon of nature such as the aurora borealis or comets streaking across the nighttime sky.

  He thought about closing his eyes and avoiding what was next, but he refused to give in to fear. Beside the hearth, just beyond his shoes, a blood-soaked pile of straw covered with a tarplike cloth appeared, and then the shape of the bodies.

  One man was lying on his back, his eyes and mouth opened wide with astonishment, the center of his shirt and chest blown apart with a bloody hole. The other man was on his side, his eyes closed in a wince, a blackened wound at his neck where the bullet must have hit.

  As the sunlight moved further into the room, the pool of blood began to recede, as if time were reversing itself. The red edges shrank toward the hearth and the bodies and the smell changed, or, rather, disappeared. This was what worried Scott— he had not heard of this aspect of the legend.

  But he didn’t run away. Instead, he sat and watched the blood drawback, disappear toward the hearth and the men. When he looked again at the bodies, he saw that their positions had changed. They were lying on the tarp face-to-face, embracing each other as if to draw their bodies closer together for warmth. The wounds and the blood were gone and there was an unmistakable intimacy between the two men—one man’s lips were nuzzled against the other’s neck, reminding Scott of how he had liked to sleep with me, before our testy dispute. As he watched the two men sleeping, he realized that they were alive and breathing and there was nothing to be afraid of.

  And then they were gone—vanishing as quickly as sunlight could fill the kitchen.

  Scott was napping in the upstairs bedroom when we returned from the movies. The violent rainstorm had tumbled branches and leaves off the maple trees closest to the house, but had left the air cool and sharp and fresh. The power had been restored and I cleaned up the papers Scott had left on the small table beside the hearth, replacing them in the manila folders, and brought them upstairs to the bedroom, along with the laptop he had left behind. He stirred lightly when I entered the room, then rolled over and shook off his sleepiness when I was beside the dresser and placing the folders and the laptop near his briefcase. “I’ll do it slowly,” he said. “The kids first.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “I’ll introduce you to Wesley and Jennifer.” Wesley and Jennifer were Scott’s children, aged thirteen and fifteen, who lived with his ex-wife. “There’s no sense in meeting Melissa. I’m sure she knows, but there’s bad blood there already.” Melissa, Scott’s ex-wife, had pressed him hard for extra money and child support during their divorce settlement.

  “Why the change?” I asked him, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  He looked up at me, met my eyes, and said, “Don’t be afraid. I saw the two men.”

  “What men?”

  “The soldiers. The ghosts of the two soldiers.”

  The blood drained from my face and my mouth opened as I looked for some kind of response or appropriate form of sympathy.

  “When the rain stopped,” he said. “They were there, lying together by the fireplace. There’s nothing to be scared about. I don’t believe they’ll cause us any harm. You were right. They were in love. I saw what they felt for each other. It’s how I feel about you. They were simply two guys who felt like us.”

  Scott was right, no harm or misfortune or calamity came to him. Or us. The two soldiers were never seen again, nor have their remains ever been searched for in the barn or relocated to a more acceptable final resting place. But Scott and I often credit the ghosts of Peter Altemus and Will Ogden with turning around our relationship and creating a solid union between us, or so we like to tell our guests when we entertain them at our own country house. In the six years we’ve been together, Scott has come out to his coworkers at the bank, I’ve stopped pressuring him for proof of his feelings for me, and we bought a house down the road from where Arnie and Mitch continue to spend their weekends. Our country house is not haunted, except on those occasions when we invite Arnie and Mitch to join us for dinner. They arrive bearing quarrels and wounded feelings, though they always seem to be in better spirits when they leave.

  THE RUSH OF LOVE

  (THE TITANIC ’70s BEFORE THE ICEBERG OF IRONY)

  Jack Fritscher

  It’s Sunday night, August 19, 1978. I’m on Pacific Southwest Airlines, window seat 12B, returning to San Francisco from Hollywood-Burbank. With some urgency and some hysteria, I’m writing with a BIC ballpoint in blue ink on some scrap paper the stewardess found for me because of something that happened for forty-eight hours beginning Friday evening, August 17, 1978—something that happened like a movie I can remember in detail but am afraid I might forget.

  What if memory is as fragile as my hot breath on the cold plastic window of this plane? What if memory is as liquid as that orange sun ball melting down into the far horizon of the Pacific? What if memory ends pretending it’s metafiction in a gay magazine?

  “Speak low when you speak love.”

  Imagine a night in late summer.

  Kick Sorenson’s maroon Corvette pulled into the drive of Dan Dufort’s duplex on Willoughby Avenue south of Santa Monica Boulevard. We teetered on the southern edge of WeHo. For six months Dan had tried to get Kick and me together. “You’re perfect for each other.”

  That sounded like the kiss of death, but it didn’t stop any one of the three of us. It was Hollywood. Kick’s car door slammed. Showtime. Dan met him at the door. Kick entered. He was better than any man I had ever seen. And I’ve seen stunners. His face alone, his body yet unwrapped, was perfect. Desire filled me. Everything I ever wanted to do with a man, to a man, or have a man do with or to me, flushed through my body. My eyes, and I’m not lying to exaggerate, came, looking at him. Never have I ever seen anyone who looked so noble, handsome, classic. The light in his blue eyes showed something more sensitive than I could ever have hoped for in a man of such physical beauty. He had no vanity. No attitude. He was what he was. He simply walked into the room and controlled the furniture, the radio, the breeze from the windows, everything, with his command presence.

  I shook his hand and sat down, knocked out by his beauty, afraid I might turn him off by being taller. He and Dan stood in the center of the room and talked. I sat silent. Speechless. He turned and smiled at me. He said nothing, communicating everything. His eyes looked deep into me. Reassuring me. As if I already heard his heart say: “Here I am. Look at me. Look at what I was born with. Look at what I have worked at improving. I like it. You like it. It’s all here. A gift to us. Let’s share it. Let’s enjoy it. Let’s let go with no reserve. Let’s get off on it together.”

  Humping his leg was out of the question.

  He had dressed himself in fantasy gear he thought would please me. He had tucked his blond body into an impeccably tailored California Highway Patrol motorcycle uniform: high-polished, calf-hugging black boots; the tan wool serge breeches bulging tight around his muscular thighs; the black leather police jacket, accessory belt with handcuffs, nightstick, and gun in the holster. His gold-framed cop glasses accented his tanned blond face. His hair was cut, groomed, and the kind of translucent blond that runs from black-blond to platinum. His bristle of moustache was authoritatively clipped, military style. He was a bulk of a man. No fag in cop drag. He understood perfect police dressage. He presented himself to me uniformed like a sculpture for an unveiling. I could tell he had an immense capacity for man-to-man fantasy play. He was, in fact, teasing me, and I was loving the foreplay. Dan had promised me a bodybuilder. Kick himself intensified the promise one step higher. He offered me my first reading of his physique as an ideal man in authority. He was perfect. He walked, flesh and blood and muscle, right into my platonic ideal of what a man should look like. He filled in all the blanks. He was my every fantasy. He was the kind of man I looked up at when I was a boy and thought, “That man. That man. That’s the kind of man I want to look like when I grow up.”

  Kick terrified me. Never in this life did I expect the fulfillment of ultimate fantasy. But, I figured, if this sexual wish to dive straight to the heart of pure masculinity could be filled, what other wishes in life could come true? Most bodybuilders give no indication that their muscle can be used for anything but flexing. Kick, in his CHP uniform, went beyond decorative muscle-for-muscle’s sake. He was an enforcer. He was a more real cop than most credentialed cops ever dream of being. He was a CHP recruiting poster.

  Kick was the way a man should be.

  He finally sat down opposite me. Dan fired up a joint. We talked about the heat and the smog and the fires along the freeway. He said he had never been to San Francisco. He asked me what the city was like. Dan sat back and grinned, listening to us making our way through the small talk with steady gains toward discoveries of everything we had in common.

  Kick and I were not strangers.

  We recognized we were old souls.

  I masked what I was sensing, afraid he might not recognize what I already knew. I asked him how he came into muscle. I could tell he was natural, not a steroid freak.

  “The summer I was twelve,” Kick’s voice was an easy lick of Alabama drawl, “I spent the summer with my uncle and aunt. They ran a filling station and café outside of Muscle Shoals.” He grinned. “I didn’t quite know then how much I’d learn to love that name. About the second week, I started noticing this trucker, a young one, came in everyday. He talked to me the way a grown man, who’s not much more than a big kid himself, jokes around with a kid. I remember he had cut the sleeves off his flannel shirt. He asked me if I wanted to feel his arm. I reached up. Way up, I remember.”

  Kick raised his arm, smoothing his moves through the gestures of his story.

 

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