Ritchie sat back on a beaten sofa he’d bought years ago at a flea market. He scanned the walls, a dull white. He’d often thought of painting a mural. The sketches were somewhere. The inspiration was nowhere to be found.
He did find inspiration in his ceramics. He had good hands. His work had begun to take on an inexplicable Egyptian motif. His new pottery works were dubbed “beautiful” and “fantastic” by admiring friends, like Ed’s, each too impoverished to make a purchase. Gallery people viewed Ritchie’s work in slides and prints. A few had come to see his pieces in the loft and at the kiln three blocks from the loft. The owner of a tiny East Village gallery had made two commissions and an offer to exhibit his work.
He thought of escaping back to college, getting a Masters. “Think of the young freshmen girls and intense lady professors,” Brian had teased him. But he needed New York, even if it didn’t need him. The museums, each a gold mine of inspiration, were what originally pulled him from his home in Youngstown. During a high school trip to New York, he had toured the Met Museum for two days. He didn’t know he’d end up spending so much time near the great works, serving food instead of making sketches. At least he could still gaze at an Etruscan bust every now and then.
He flipped through his small phone book and dialed another number.
“Hi. This is Therese. Speak.”
Beeeep.
Daunted by the curt message, he stuttered a greeting.
“Um, Therese, Ritchie Hurst. You mentioned a movie, um, Film Forum’s showing that Bertolucci you talked about. Gimme a call.” As he set down the phone, he noticed the clay fingerprints, but didn’t wipe them off.
Jesus, you have to be a radio announcer or give phone sex just to get a date
, he thought. He returned to his pottery, trying not to think of Therese or the general state of his romantic life.
New York women constituted a sea Ritchie could rarely fathom. Like his gay friends, the wild sexual days from college had definitely taken a nosedive, and AIDS wasn’t the only thing to blame.
Ritchie hadn’t had a date in two months. The last was a nice, smart assistant-assistant to Leo Castelli. A good conversationalist, even after two dates, she never invited him in. A few weeks of lingering phone tag assured Ritchie that their schedules were working very hard to prohibit anything more.
He saw her again at Ear Bar one night, with another man. He was with Ed, Brian, and a blind date Ed introduced him to. He wanted to leave the three of them, ask her to dump her date and go off with him, just like in a perfume commercial or
The Graduate
. He didn’t, but remained polite throughout the evening, and upon getting his date into a cab, pointed a finger at Ed. “Never do that again. Never set me up again.” The boys obeyed.
After that recent ordeal, Ritchie consigned himself to the fact that his hands were better equipped for handling forms of clay rather than flesh.
7
Flat marble swirled in a circle at their feet, an unsteady waiter’s
downfall, they were about to be warned.
Philipe stood silently atop a milk crate, waiting for their attention. The captains, Neil Pynchon and Ron Bellows, an older senior waiter with a dashing pepper-speckled beard, each stood at Philipe’s side like guard dogs.
Philipe held a silver knife high up in his hand. As the warm light from the library reading racks fell behind him in silhouette, the sanctity of his pose was broken by the rushed footsteps of two young waiters who’d spent a few too many minutes primping in the men’s room. “Write down ze names,” Philipe muttered to Ron Bellows, who glanced at the guilty faces and jotted their names in his notebook.
His arm held high, clutching the glinting knife, Philipe continued.
“Zere is a sound made by ze unfortunate combination of marble, silver, gravity and clumsiness. I call it ze Hell’z Bellz.” The knife fell. The clatter pierced the air, echoing through the stone hall. Several waiters cupped their ears. Some burst into laughter. Philipe cracked a grin, awaiting their return to silence. Neil retrieved the knife.
“I trust that is ze last time I will hear it tonight.” He looked over his clipboard. “Now, for your table assignments ... Mistah Wyndam?”
Lee raised his hand.
“You are at table one wiss Mistah Rook, who is your A waitaire.”
Lee scanned the crew for a familiar blond head, almost as pale as Ed’s. He saw Kevin Rook’s sharply chiseled face. The two made eye contact. Lee was elated to share a table of high rank with Kevin, whom he always considered untouchably handsome, especially in the changing rooms when he stole glances at his tightly sculpted muscles.
“Mrs. Kennedy will be dining at your table,” Philipe said. “I trust you are both Democrats?” The workers giggled again. Philipe continued through the list of table assignments, naming the headwaiter and his or her assistant.
Since Kevin had risen to the rank of serving a VVIP table, mostly through his good looks and tenacity, he stood relaxed while half the staff served cocktails and hors d’oeuvres on the Library floor below. Lee still fluttered inside with a mild anticipation. Had he risen so soon, or was this merely a test? He glanced around the space, one of three arranged in shelf-lined studies of the Arents Collection, the Berg Collection and their room, the Art, Prints and Photographs Division.
“I could do with a few hundred of these precious tomes,” Kevin softly blurted.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Did you see these?” He picked up a novel, a recently published work by a recently lauded novelist, Drew Van Sully. One had been placed on each seat.
“Mmnnn. I’ve got dibs on whatever they don’t take home.”
“This got a good review somewhere,” Lee said, clutching at a conversational straw.
“Thicker Than Water.
It’s about this gay swimmer who’s got AIDS and goes to Egypt.” He wanted to make a good impression on Kevin, but too-handsome men made him stutter and sweat.
“Oh, yeah, I heard about that.”
Lee set the book down. “Are you working the MOMA party next week?”
“Oh no. I’m going to Washington. Actually, Maryland.”
“Oh, what for?”
“Didn’t you know?” Kevin broke his waiterly stance. His eyes lit up quick as a gas flame and he became suddenly enthused. “ACT UP’s taking over the FDA building.”
Lee had seen the posters around town and noticed a few news articles, but was embarrassingly ignorant about the group’s activities.
“This may sound dumb, but what for?”
“Don’t feel dumb. You just need information.” Kevin excitedly explained about the organization’s plans to shut down the lumbering administrative building to protest its lethargy in approving AIDS drugs. “We’re eight years into an epidemic and they’ve only approved one drug, and that’s the most expensive drug ever made. And it wasn’t even made for AIDS. It’s an old cancer drug that’s been sitting on the shelves for years.”
The speed with which Kevin talked excited Lee. Deceptively embodied in a blonde gym bunny was an encyclopedia of treatment programs, drug trials, and toxicity rates in pharmaceuticals. For all the incomprehensible talk, Lee couldn’t help but notice how being so over-informed made Kevin ... sexier.
“You should go with us,” Kevin suggested. “It’ll be great fun.”
“Don’t they ... arrest people for that?”
“Oh, sure,” Kevin shrugged it off. “That’s the fun part, sharing jail cells with hunky boys.”
Lee grinned at the idea. He’d seen the type on the street; short hair, Doc Martens, black bomber jackets. They had seemed distant as another species, and Kevin had simply invited him in.
“I don’t know how you can be so radical and do these jobs,” Lee said. “I mean, what if you were working some party full of rightwingers? What would you do, handcuff yourself to a chair leg?”
“Maybe.” Kevin grinned. “If I had legal support. Besides, we serve those people all the time. See, the problem with a protest like that would be the focus. Everybody’s got something to scream about. It’s much stronger when you bring a couple hundred of your best friends.”
“I see.”
“You should come to a meeting sometime.”
“Yeah, I’ll try to, if I’m not working. Seems Fabulous always call me for Mondays.”
“I’ll call to remind you,” Kevin grinned.
“Yeah, do that.”
Kevin glanced toward the entrance of the library wing. A ruffled pink gown with a wire-thin woman inside it floated through the doorway, escorted by a corpulent man in black.
“Here they come,” Kevin murmured. “En garde.”
Brian once again fought the urge to swipe a bottle of Bollinger and hide out in a back room. His B waiter had failed to show up at their table, which, since it lay close to the exit, turned out to be the source for the other waiters to snatch a needed fork or wineglass. In addition to the missing utensils, the sticks of sourdough bread, so stiff as to be practically inedible, left that incriminating dusty residue on the crimson napkins.
Infected with the disease of Perpetual Neatness, he brushed off the napkins, giving each a harsh blow.
“What are you doing?” quizzed a thin blond waiter who resembled a young J. Crew model, because he was a J. Crew model.
“A little house cleaning.” Brian jerked up, at first nervous. Upon giving the waiter a once over, he realized his rank. “Are you my B waiter?”
“Is this your table you’re blowing?”
“Yup.” Brian placed his hands authoritatively behind his back, staring the kid down while holding back a giggle at his remark.
“Then I guess I’m your B.”
“Terrific,” Brian said, glaring over to Neil Pynchon, who supervised the third shifting of the tables.
He did this just to piss me off,
he thought.
That’s what I get for never calling him back after fucking him.
“Listen, we need three forks, a water glass and a new napkin. Why don’t you go get them while I hold the fort?”
“Where do we get those?” the rookie asked, slightly panicking. Brian took a bottle of red wine from his hand and gave him his white, since he had unwittingly taken two reds.
“Never mind, I’ll get it. Just ask them if they want red or white, and only pour half a glass.”
“But what’ll I do until then?”
“Fake it.”
The young man stiffened as a tall imposing woman sat at their table, folding her white mink stole over her chair as her husband stood near her, blocking access to her wineglass. The young waiter cringed silently. His pathetic look left Brian wondering how Lee was doing in the other room, whether he had adjusted to the slimy glamour of the job.
Brian spent the evening considering his fate, and the fate of others who’d been hurled into his little world. Only Ed cut through it. Didn’t Lee see the change in him, see how Ed was so much better, that the intensity of his summer with Lee was doomed to burn out? He’d have to explain it to Lee, just to get that hurt look off his squirrelly face.
Lee did much better than his first days. Armed with Kevin’s competence and disarming glances, he managed to serve without a mishap, and coasted on a small wave of pride as he finished clearing after the main course, having spilled nary a crumb in Caroline’s lap. Walking swiftly to the drop off station, however, he miscalculated the distance to the Hefty Bag-lined milk crates, and his plateful of used silverware clattered to the marble floor.
Ze Hell’z Bellz.
“Are we gravity-impaired?” whined Lenny, a plastic quart bottle of diet Pepsi clutched in his stubby hand.
“Sorry.” Lee leaned down to retrieve the spilt silver, but succeeded in blocking the line of waiters behind, resulting in a near faux-sodomy conga line of dominos.