When the phone rings, the sound startles me. Before I pick up the receiver, I take a deep breath to collect myself and I repeat in my head a brief incantation-slash-affirmation: you deserve good things.
"Dan-O." Stuart's rumbly bass booms over the line. "Got your message. You okay?"
"Sure."
"What's going on?"
"Oh, nothing much." The master of understatement. "I was just thinking about coming into the city, and I wondered if you were up for a little libation and conversation."
"What, now?" He pauses, then asks again. "What's up?" His voice is quietly insistent, as though I have bad news to spring on him, and I may as well cut to the chase. I suspect this is a habit he developed from years of talking with doctors.
"Nothing's up. Robin's up in Maine for a few days, and I'm just not in the mood to sit home."
"She went up there alone?"
"No, not alone." I'm trying to remember if I said anything in my message that would put Stuart on high alert like this. "She's with her dad and his wife. I was going to go, but I'm on first refusal for a commercial, so I have to sit tight until Friday."
"So you're all alone in the city, huh, big boy?" Apparently satisfied, Stuart reverts to the banter we established years and years ago, when he played Falstaff to my Prince Hal at the Dallas Shakespeare festival. The play more or less set a tone for our friendship in that he still likes to pretend that his job in life is to corrupt me. That he is gay supposedly makes him privy to all kinds of depravity; the fact that I am straight and, better yet, from Oklahoma makes me forever the innocent rube.
In fact, he's always led a very conventional and quiet life. Even when he was still acting, he was the designated adult in our group, the only one with a steady partner, dental insurance, matching glassware, all the markers of responsible living. When Andre got sick, Stuart stopped taking out-of-town jobs and gradually got hooked into this company that does books on tape. He started off just reading the books, but gradually slid over to the production side, too, because they needed the insurance coverage. Now he goes to work every morning and is probably home and in bed by nine most nights.
I take the subway in, and when we pull into Wall Street, the car fills with a swarm of worker bees heading home. It's probably still in the low eighties on the street and a good ten degrees warmer in here. A hundred upraised arms perfume the tired air. At each stop, the doors open and more bodies squeeze in. One Wall Street hustler uses his briefcase as a battering ram, letting the doors bump open and shut until he can press himself into the last inch of open space on the inside of the car. I am wedged against a young woman with plump bare arms. Behind her, a man with his suit coat flung tiredly over his shoulder holds up a wilted copy of the Post with his free hand. We are all immodestly close, and each time the train lurches around a curve, slows or speeds up, we are flung against the warm flesh of our neighbors. The woman and I are both pretending mightily, she that her breasts are not pressed into my stomach, I that the Yankees' win over the Angels is gripping reading.
Stuart and I have made plans to meet at McLeary's, one of the old hangouts on Amsterdam. It's a typical Irish bar, sawdust on the floor, greasy sausages in a warming tray for happy hour, cheap and friendly and one of the few reminders that the neighborhood was working class not too long ago. The owner has hung some ferns in the window and put out a few tables on the sidewalk to siphon off the yuppies who now stream up and down the avenue at night, but the clientele seems unchanged from twenty, thirty years ago. A half-dozen grizzled old men watch the Yankees game at the bar; a couple younger ones flirt with an orange-haired woman in a thigh gripping miniskirt. They are like Eugene O'Neill characters in The Iceman Cometh, preserved in the smoky amber tar that coats every surface of the bar. I don't recognize anyone except Stuart, sitting at a table near the jukebox. He grins and leaps to his feet, arms open to embrace me.
"Hey, you're looking good, Stu," I tell him, slapping his back with one hand and patting his gut with the other, a guy hug. He's built like an opera tenor, big and barrel-chested. He played Falstaff without padding and even did Santa for Macy's one year. ("Don't let me do that again, not if you care for me," he said afterward with jokey terror.) Then when Andre was withering away, Stuart responded by bulking up even more, eating both portions of whatever dish he'd whipped up to tempt Andre.
"I'm going to the gym three times a week. I hate it," he moans, but he seems pleased that I've noticed. "I pedal and pedal and pedal. It's so boring. They have videotapes where you can bike the back roads of France, but you can't pull over and eat a nice little lunch of pate and cheese and champagne. So where's the fun in that?"
I get us a pitcher from the bar, and we settle back into the drowsy glow of a late August evening. We talk and we watch the passing scene outside: the couples locked in heated conversations, the men in dark glasses and the gorgeous women who are palpably aware of being watched, the skinny guy hawking designer watches and keeping one eye peeled for the cops. The drone of the sportscasters is soothing, a white noise surging now and then with the derisive hoots of the patrons at the bar, and I'm tipsy well before we've drained the first pitcher. I'm having a good time. We're yakking about the shows we've seen lately, who's good in what, who stinks, who we would have cast instead.
"Speaking of which," Stuart is saying, "I saw Marylou on a rerun of Chicago Hope last week. Did you see it? She was doing the sister of this guy who's dying of some disease."
Marylou Kolodejchuk, a.k.a. Marilou Cole, a.k.a. the woman with whom I spent a few besotted, pre-Robin years until she made a pilgrimage out to LA for pilot season and just never bothered to come back.
"She fell back on that old plucky-through-the-tears thing-she does, but she was pretty good. God, remember that night she waltzed through the back wall of the set?"
We stroll down memory lane, Stuart and I, with Marylou waltzing and Jim Callahan listening to the Yankees games backstage and Sarkowski with that ratty old pea coat he wore everywhere, even to the Tonys that year, and Amanda and that boyfriend of hers, what was his name, the one who turned out to be freshly sprung from Bellevue, arguing at the top of their lungs on the street in front of Steve's until someone in an upstairs apartment began pelting them with garbage. And then there was the time Amanda and Robin made fried chicken and mashed potatoes at three in the morning, and all of us sat around drinking Jack Daniel's and eating chicken and telling stories. And the time we drove down to Louisville in Gordy Hopper's Electra 88 with the busted muffler and the ice cubes for air-conditioning. And the time Karl went up in the middle of his monologue and asked someone in the front row if she had seen the play before and did she happen to remember his next line.
Most of these people aren't around anymore. Karl's out in LA now, too, manages a plant care business, waters houseplants for all the Hollywood muckety-mucks. Calls Stuart periodically, tells him whose plants he's doing, that Kathleen Turner keeps killing her ferns, doesn't know what she does to them, but they're brown as cockroaches in two weeks. Amanda married a tree farmer and moved to New Hampshire, has four-year-old twins. Jim and Dorrie Callahan moved out to Denver, so there's a standing invitation to come and ski anytime. Steve died. Hopper went back to Baltimore after his dad's stroke, took over the family's office supplies business. Then Andre, Stuart's lover, died. The knot of our circle keeps shrinking. It used to be we could make a few calls and get up a crowd on a few hours' notice, a night hanging out here at McLeary's, shooting pool, or a spontaneous party at one of a half-dozen apartments on the Upper West Side. Or Sarkowski's place on West Forty-fifth, which was decorated like a frat house, someone always passed out on the couch or hanging out between auditions, amazing to think that his beach house was actually in Architectural Digest last year. Nowadays, any kind of gathering requires weeks of planning and then the evening ends somewhere before ten because there are babysitters and morning appointments and long drives back to Jersey.