The Relentless Passage of Time
A Law Edwards Mystery
Part 1 of 2
(Part 2 is entitled Montana Sky)
1
You’re an Asshole
The hour was late when I finally arrived in the alley behind Walt’s Special. There was bad traffic on the way into the city. The notorious Schuylkill Expressway which ran along the river of the same name was deadlocked due to an accident. The traffic nearly tripled the duration of what should have been a ninety-minute trip from Reading to Philly. It delayed me long enough that it was almost eleven when I set the padlock on the garage doors and walked along the alley to the front of the building.
The mid-December cold bit into my hands as I noticed another station wagon parked behind the restaurant. No one was supposed to park in the alley, so I stopped to take a look. The car turned out to be Doc’s Oldsmobile. He must have gotten it back from Hank Kellerman’s shop while I was out of town.
I was glad to see he had the car back. He was probably going stir crazy without his wheels. I made a mental note to telephone Hank in the morning to find out what I owed him for the repairs. I shook my head when I remembered that Hank Kellerman was dead by almost five years. His shop was owned and run by Arthur (Sunshine) Constantine and his partner of the last fifteen years, Theodore (Ted) Danton.
I shook my head again at the relentless passage of time and plodded toward the entrance to the apartment. When I made it around front, I paused to stand in the glow from the divided-light front window of the restaurant. The dining room was empty, and the chairs were turned up on the tables.
The place looked the way it always did. The walls were still yellow, and the drapes were still green, and the chandeliers still flickered with electric candlelight. Both of Walt’s hard-earned Firestone Stars sparkled from their place of honor on the wall over the host’s station. There were no outward signs that the man whose ambition had brought the place into being was (hopefully) sleeping peacefully sixty miles away in the bedroom of his childhood home. There was no recognition of the fact that he was trying to recover from a heart attack which had almost taken his life.
My imagination conjured the image of a deep-red heart. It wasn’t a Valentine’s Day heart, but a heart of flesh. It beat the way it was supposed to, the two top chambers, then the two lower chambers, over and over again. An ugly scar branded itself across the muscle. The scar was pink in its freshness and tender and painful to its owner. They said the scar would grow tough and would eventually become part of the muscle. While it would never help to pump blood, it would cease to be a burden.
Even as my imagination conjured the images, I wondered how any of what I’d been told could be true. The heart could never be the same. A part of the muscle was damaged. The flesh had been starved of blood by a blocked artery and was basically dead. It would never again serve the purpose the Lord made it for. The heart would always be less than it was.
My husband’s heart was damaged. It was broken, and it would never again be as strong as it had been. One day, the heart would stop, and Walt would die, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
I fumbled with my keys to open the apartment door. Try as I might, I couldn’t select the right one from the bunch. All the jingling pieces of brass looked the same to my old eyes. My clumsy, arthritic fingers were no better at telling one from the other. I blinked to try to clear my vision, but my effort failed. My sight worsened as tears of frustration filled my eyes and ran down my face.
Without warning, the light over the door flicked on. The brightness stole what was left of my vision. The door opened inward, and a man stood on the threshold. He was about my height, but he seemed taller because he stood on the landing at the bottom of the interior steps. His long, brown hair was tied back and his lean, bone-white face was obscured on its lower half by a scraggly brown beard. He was dressed in a plain white t-shirt and khaki slacks.
My presence startled him. “LAW!”
I tried to greet the man who helped to save my husband’s life, but my voice refused to work. I had to clear my throat before I could even whisper his name. I took my handkerchief from my inside pocket and mopped my tears away.
Doc’s deep-set, blue eyes searched my face. “Are you alright? I was in the kitchen when I saw you park in the garage. I kept waiting for you to come up. When you didn’t, I came down to check.”
I cleared my throat again and told an obvious lie. “I’m fine.”
He stepped onto the sidewalk and waited for me to enter the apartment. I climbed the steps and stood in the living room while he relocked the door. The only light in the room was the flicker of the console television. The Late Show with Johnny Carson was on.
Carson had just started his monologue. His voice droned with that damned mid-western twang. He smirked from the screen like he knew that whatever he was saying was going to get a good laugh. I hated his self-satisfied, smirking face. I wondered how he could smirk and tell jokes when my husband was fighting for his life.
Doc must have sensed my disgust for the unwelcome television visitor. He switched off the set and spoke into the silence left behind. “I was having a drink. I got done in the kitchen early. It was a slow day. Owen said Wednesday nights are usually slow. He said I could knock off early.”
I didn’t hear a word he said. I was too busy searching the apartment for all the time which had passed since Walt and I moved into it. I clicked a lamp on like the light would help me find a stack of years in a dark corner, like old newspapers bound for the trash. Walt opened the restaurant in 1947. We’d lived above it for twenty-one years. The time seemed like an eternity, but it also seemed like the blink of an eye. I mentioned it to Doc. “I’ve lived in this apartment for twenty-one years.”
He stared like he expected me to say something else. When I didn’t, he grew uncomfortable. “I was having a drink. I found rye whiskey in the cabinet in the kitchen. I hope you don’t mind. The bottle was open.”
I still hadn’t heard him. I repeated myself like he hadn’t spoken. “Twenty-one years. Where the hell does it go?”
He called my name to get my attention.
I finally spoke to him instead of at him. “What?”
He stared at me for another moment, then waved my question away like it was a wisp of cigarette smoke. “Nothing; nothing at all. I was having a drink. Do you want one?”
“Sure. There should be an open bottle of rye in the kitchen cabinet over the sink.”
He nodded and went to the kitchen. He called a question back. “How do you want it?”
“In a glass.”
I looked around the living room again. The quiet was oppressive. I wanted to hear something that wasn’t just my own thoughts. I wanted some life in the room. The place felt closed-up, like an ancient mausoleum. I almost switched the television set back on, but the memory of Johnny Carson’s smirk made me leave it off.
I shed my overcoat and tossed it over a chair. I went to the far wall where the console stereo sat and lifted the dark wooden lid to expose the controls. I turned the plastic knob to power the amplifier. The loudspeaker crackled and hummed while the tubes warmed. The band on the tuner had been changed from AM to FM. Doc must have been listening to his rock and roll. I didn’t want to hear any modern trash. I wanted to hear real music. I switched the band back where it belonged and turned the tuner dial toward the higher frequencies.
The loudspeaker came to life with a hissing swirl of static as I hunted for the station I knew was there. I found the numbers and tuned the signal. Music came through the static with a bouncy horn section and a shrill clarinet all tangled among the round brass notes. I tuned a little more until the music grew louder than the static. The lyrics sounded like they were shouted from a Victrola horn, but I recognized the tune immediately.
I patted the soft amber glow of the radio dial in thanks. “Cole Porter, I’ve missed you.” The tune was ‘Let’s Misbehave.’ I couldn’t identify the band leader who sang it, but the song was pure Porter.
Doc appeared at my elbow to offer a rocks glass half-filled with soft amber liquor. I accepted it and pointed at the radio dial. “Did you know Cole Porter was queer?”
He shook his head. “Is that him singing?”
I scoffed at the question. “Of course not. He was the composer. He didn’t sing. He wrote the songs. Cole Porter was the voice of the twenties; him and Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. We celebrated the Roaring Twenties with them, and they made us smile during the Great Depression. They even wrote the music of the Second World War.”
Doc popped his shoulders up in a quick shrug. The names meant nothing to him. He was too young, and I was too goddamned old.
I turned the music up and sang along. I closed my eyes and carried my glass while I did a little, half-time waltz across the room. “Bum, bum, bum, bum, buuum, buuuuum, bum…bum, bum, bum…let’s misbehave!”
The song ended and a commercial break started. A chorus of excited voices sang about the virtues of toothpaste. I ignored the advertisement and opened my eyes to find myself face to face with Doc. I’d unintentionally herded him across the room.
He didn’t seem to mind. Instead of chiding me for my poor dancing, he asked the question I expected since I walked in. “How’s Walt?”
The question slammed the lid on my temporary fun. I found my whiskey glass in my right hand and drank from it. “He’s hurting. His heart hurts him all the time. He doesn’t like to sit still. He hates it. That’s why the restaurant was always so good for him. It gave him something to do. Now he has to sit, and he hates it. He has to, though. Every time he tries to do things, his heart hurts and he has to stop.”
“The pain is a good reminder. He has to learn to take it easy.”
I shook my head at the impossibility of the suggestion. My mind flashed with a hundred incidents from the last week. Every time I’d left Walt alone for more than a moment, he was up doing things. I’d caught him scrubbing the kitchen, washing clothes, airing linens, polishing the furniture, putting his coat on to get more wood for the fire. Each time I caught him, I would stop his work and lead him back to his chair.
He always objected that he was fine. “It’s better for me to do anything than it is to sit.”
I begged him each and every time. “Please, Love. The doctors said you need time to heal.”
Even though he insisted he was fine, the set of his jaw told a different story. When Walt was in pain, he had a habit of clenching his teeth tightly together between his words. Each time I returned him to his chair, I saw the characteristic set of his jaw.
I understood why he kept trying to do things. He hated the idea that his life would never be the same. Sometimes he seemed resigned to it, but most of the time he looked like he planned to fight against his new circumstances. The fight in his eyes is what scared me the most. I worried constantly that he would overdo it. I worried he would work harder than his heart would permit. I worried I’d have to watch helplessly while he writhed and thrashed on the floor with another heart attack. I was terrified that another one would kill him.
My worry for the love of my life, and the selfish dread I harbored over what it would be like if he died and left me alone, overwhelmed my ability to keep the emotions inside. They burst forth as a fit of desperate sobs. I covered my eyes with my left hand as I wept. My right was still occupied with my whiskey glass.
Doc took the glass from me. He set it down and came back to offer me the support of proximity. He put his hands on my shoulders. I seized him and hugged his body to mine. He returned my embrace and patted my back. I cried on his shoulder for many minutes until I was able to manage my emotions.
I explained my outburst once I had control of my voice again. “I’m so scared. I’m so afraid to lose him. I always thought I’d go first. I never considered that he might be the first. I don’t know if I can live without him. I don’t want to have to try.”
Doc offered words of consolation. “You’re right to be worried. The heart attack Walt suffered was a big one. He’s got a lot going for him, though. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink much. He’s in great shape for a guy his age. If he takes care of himself and avoids stress, there’s no reason he couldn’t live another ten or maybe even twenty years.”
I tried to take solace in the words of encouragement. I wanted to believe that Walt would live to be eighty-six, maybe even ninety. There was no way I’d last that long. At some point during those years, I would go to my rest and he could follow in his own good time. With his knack for staying busy, he wouldn’t miss me half as much as I would miss him if he went first. If he could live that much longer, even with a scar on his heart, everything would be alright.
While I was busy trying to believe my young friend, the commercial break on the radio ended. The program host announced the next tune, but I didn’t catch what it was. The music started and I knew what it was. Virginia Bruce warbled another Cole Porter masterpiece, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin.’
I asked for a favor. “Dance with me.”
“I…uh…I don’t dance.”
“Neither do I. Dance with me anyway. Humor a sad old man who’s lost between his dread of the future and his memories of the past.”
He hesitated, but in the end, his desire to help won over his embarrassment. “Show me what to do.”
I arranged his hands, one on my shoulder and one behind my back, then I mirrored my hands to his. I led us in slow steps around the living room. Our motions were choppy and uneven. Our steps didn’t match the music at all, but we danced. I whispered my memory of another dance as we revolved around the room.
“Thirty years ago, long before you were born or even thought of, I danced to this song with my husband. He wasn’t my husband yet. He wouldn’t be for another ten years. Walt was in love with me, but I was too dense to see it. He made me dinner and gave me drinks. We shared a very expensive cigar. He made me feel like a king. When I didn’t think the night could get any better, he asked me to dance. Walt is strong. He’s much stronger than he looks. He held me in his strong arms and moved us together. We danced to this song, then he took me to bed. When I look back on it, that night was probably one of the best nights of my life.”
“That’s nice.” Doc said as the tune came to an end. We separated but remained close. He had a question on his face. He noticed something in the story that didn’t make sense. “If that was one of your best nights, why did it take so long for you and him to become, uh…husbands?”
“I was afraid of the type of relationship he wanted with me. I was a different person then, an angry man. I was afraid of destroying Walt’s kindness with my anger. In the end, the opposite happened. He destroyed my anger with his kindness. Love is much stronger than hate. You should remember that. Hate is easier, but love is much more powerful. That’s a lesson the whole world needs to learn.”
I heaved a breath and noticed the wet stain my tears had left on Doc’s shoulder. I brushed at it with my fingers. “I’m sorry for crying on you.”
He shrugged like it didn’t matter. “It’s ok. I’m glad I was here for you to cry on.”
I gave up my pointless brushing and I noticed my rocks glass at the edge of my vision. It was on the end table near the chesterfield sofa. I sat down and took up the glass for another sip. My sip turned into a gulp, and then several gulps until I drained the glass. Doc took the empty from me and went to the kitchen to fill it up again. He carried his drink to refresh it at the same time. When he came back, he sat very close to me. He was close enough that I could feel the heat of his body.
The rye I gulped dampened my haywire emotions and made me feel just a little bit better. I had a sip of the fresh drink and set it aside. Another Cole Porter tune was on the radio. The station was featuring my favorite composer. I was pleased. If Walt had been there, he would have been pleased as well. He liked Porter, not as much as I did, but close. He didn’t cling to the past like I did. He liked tradition, but he accepted the passage of time and the newness of what came. I always resisted change. I wondered about the difference between us.
I set my wonderment aside and asked a more pertinent question. “Do you have plans for tomorrow? I’m back from Reading because Walt was worried about the restaurant. He wanted to come so he could check on it, but I refused to let him. The end of the year is just about here. I’ve got to reconcile the books and do a complete inventory of the dry goods and the silver and the linens and every other damn thing. If you’ve got time, I could use the help.”
“No problem.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure.”
I turned my body toward his to get his undivided attention. “No, I mean, thank you, truly. I owe you. Nothing I could say or do would be enough to thank you for what you did when Walt had his heart attack. You stayed with me every step of the way. You helped me understand the gibberish the doctors at the hospital spouted. You even helped to convince Walt to recover up in Reading instead of here. You would probably disagree if I said you saved his life. You helped though. You helped in all the ways I couldn’t. I can’t thank you enough.”
He grew uncomfortable from my thanks and praise. He fidgeted and muttered his appreciation for my words.
I changed the subject to ease his embarrassment. “Do you really think he could live another twenty years? Even with a scar on his heart? Is that possible?”
“I think it is.”
I had another sip of my whiskey and let my head rest against the back of the chesterfield. “Another twenty years would be incredible. He and I have known each other since 1936. We lived together since 1944 and we’ve been married since 1947. The twenty-one years since we were married have been the very best years of my life. If I could have another twenty, even another ten, I would cherish every moment.”
“What’s it like being married to a man?”
I lifted my head to face his question. “What do you mean?”
He waved his hand around the room. “This apartment looks like a regular apartment. There’s no feminine touches. You don’t have any doilies on the end tables or lace accents pinned to the arms of the chairs, but besides that, it looks like the apartment of a regular couple. You’ve got framed pictures on the walls and photos on the tables. There’s a crucifix at the top of the stairs. I even found a church bulletin in the magazine rack. I don’t get it.”
“What don’t you get?”
He raised his arms and dropped them in a gesture of exasperation like I was thick-headed. “You’re both men! How can this place be so normal and boring?”
I finally understood why he was confused. Because we were queer, he expected to find evidence of our deviant lifestyle. He was shocked that we lived in a regular apartment well-suited to the lives of two regular people. I made a poor joke. “My French maid outfit is at the cleaners.”
The joke didn’t land right. Doc’s eyes bugged out like he was a character in a Warner Brothers cartoon. He stared like he was trying to imagine my overweight, elderly body trussed up in a bodice and a frilly lace skirt. I laughed again. “I’m kidding. Walt and I don’t have anything like that. We’re just people. We live like regular people. We work and eat and sleep and talk and listen to the radio and watch television and cook and clean and do all the things regular people do. The only difference is he and I chose each other instead of women.”
He asked what sounded like the same question. “What’s it like?”
“I just told you.”
He shook his head. “No, I mean, what’s…uh, what’s intimacy like?”
“You mean sex?”
He blanched at my use of the word, but I didn’t understand why. I assumed that a man who was trained to be a physician would be indifferent to the discussion of biological realities. I realized that just because he knew the anatomy, the various combinations of the anatomy might still startle him. I tried to answer his question without providing specifics. “It’s a lot like you would imagine. Parts fit together and it feels good.”
“So…you and Walt…who…uh…takes the woman’s role?”
I snapped over the question. It made me angry in its ignorance. “Neither of us is a woman!”
He cringed away from me. I took a deep breath and had another sip of rye to calm myself. My sip became a gulp which ended with me draining the glass a second time. I hadn’t eaten in a while, so the liquor hit me almost as soon as I swallowed it. It felt good to be drunk. It felt good to surrender my stress to the booze. I had almost decided on getting myself a refill when Doc apologized. “I didn’t mean to call you a woman. I don’t know the right words.”
The reasonable part of me wanted to explain the correct terms to the doctor. The part of me which was enjoying the buzz of being drunk didn’t want to go through the hassle. I was worn out and hungry. My nerves were frazzled from the drive and the traffic. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to finish getting drunk, just me and Cole Porter. I didn’t want to answer any silly ass questions about what it was like to be queer. I liked Doc, and I owed him, so I picked a middle path. I asked why he wanted to know.
He shrugged like he wasn’t sure. “I thought maybe…I don’t know, maybe I might be, you know, like you.”
I was surprised because everything I knew about the man ran counter to the idea that he could be queer. “But, you had a fiancé. You were going to get married and have kids. Why would you think you might be queer?”
He gestured around the living room again. “What you and Walt have is nice. It’s close to what I want. I thought maybe I could get it easier with a man.”
I could barely believe my ears. I had to admit that times had changed, but not very much. It was easier to be a fag in 1968 than it had been in 1932, but that didn’t mean it was easy. My kind still didn’t have the acceptance we’d had at the end of the twenties. Even back then, we weren’t exactly ‘mainstream.’ Doc’s suggestion that the life which Walt and I had fought to build over the entirety of our lives was somehow ‘easy’ kindled the fire of my rage. “NONE OF THIS WAS FUCKING EASY!”
He shrank further away as I shouted. In his wide, nervous eyes, I saw the truth of his questions. I realized why he asked them. He was hoping to use my lifestyle as a way to hide from his own life which hadn’t worked out for him. “I get it.” I said with my rage contained, but with meanness in my heart and in my voice. “You’re a coward.”
“Like hell I am!” He sprang from his spot at my side and stood to face me from the perceived advantage of height.
I was certain I was right, so I remained seated. I sneered and broadened my accusation. “You thought you had your whole life figured out. You had your education, you were in the middle of your residency, and you had a hot piece of ass for a fiancé. Everything was perfect until she fucked it all up for you. The bitch bailed and left you in a lurch. There you were, with all your dreams smashed to shit. You couldn’t hack it, so you ran away to Vietnam. The war fucked you up even worse, so you buried yourself deeper when you got back. You lived at the YMCA and mopped floors for pocket change. Now you want to leave women behind because fuck all of ‘em. You think if you can convince yourself to like cock instead of pussy, your life will be smooth. Sorry, Doctor, that’s not how it works.”
He glared. His sour expression tried to return the nastiness I spouted. “You’re an asshole.”
“Maybe. Better than being a fucking coward. How long do you figure you can hide from your life? Let me tell you from experience, it always finds you. You’ve done pretty well, so far. You hid in the army. You hid at the Y. Now you’re hiding here; a fucking trained physician with a certificate and all, using his doctor’s hands to scrub greasy pots in my husband’s kitchen. Here you are; living on my couch, drinking my booze, and asking damn-fool questions about what it’s liked to get fucked in the ass. By the way, it’s great. I love it! Walt loves it too. He likes it even more than me. He can shoot his load just from being fucked. I’ve always been jealous of that. Now you know. You happy?”
He glared with hot, angry eyes. “You’re an asshole.”
I shrugged with indifference and crossed my arms over my chest. “I already agreed with you on that. So what?”
“FUCK YOU, IS WHAT!” He flew around the room. He threw his coat on, found his shoes and put them on. He gathered his personal effects and took his car keys from the table at the top of the stairs. He jammed his hand in his pants pocket and drew out a wad of folded bills. He counted some off and tossed them on the table. “I owe you some money. That’s all I can spare.” He shoved the remaining cash back where it came from. “I’ll send you the rest when I’ve got it.”
He plunged down the stairs and through the street door at the bottom. I remained on the chesterfield with my teeth clamped. I nursed my anger and tried to convince myself that I’d been right to blast Doc the way I had. When my drunken, angry half couldn’t convince my reasonable half that I’d been right, both halves decided that I really was an asshole, and I needed to apologize.
I hurried down the stairs, but I was too late. I reached the sidewalk just in time to see Doc’s Oldsmobile careen around the corner from the alley. I called after him, but the windows of his car were closed against the cold. I don’t know if he heard me or not. Either way, he didn’t stop or slow. I watched helplessly while his red taillights disappeared into the night.
“Shit.” I swore and rubbed my palms over my face. “Shit.”
I was too tired and too drunk to get the car out to chase him. Even if I was able, I had no idea how I’d find him. I would look in the morning. I berated myself because I’d taken all the worry I had for my husband and turned it to meanness for my friend. I’d been worse than mean; I’d been cruel to a man who helped to save Walt’s life. I deserved the telling off he’d given me. I deserved much more. I deserved an ass-kicking for what I said.
I looked up at the sky and apologized to the only man who could hear me. “I’m sorry, Lord. Keep that young man safe, please. Don’t let him do anything reckless. I’ll find him in the morning and try to make it right.”
I went back into the apartment and went to bed.
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