Hardscrabble Road(2)

His hair was wet, and all the rubbing he was doing with the towel wasn’t making it any drier. The heat was on full blast, as if it needed to be to guard against the ridiculous cold they’d been having week after week for a month now. He had left his clothes over the top of the hamper: boxer shorts, trousers, undershirt, good white shirt. His socks and shoes were in the bedroom. His ties were hanging from tie holders in the closet. There was a sweater laid out on the bed. He was working very hard not to put on a tie for a day when he was doing nothing but hanging around Cavanaugh Street.

“Didn’t you ever wonder about Ozzie Nelson?” Bennis had asked him once. “I mean, he never went out of the house, and there he was wearing a tie to sit in the living room reading the paper while the television was on.”

He put on the boxer shorts and the undershirt and the trousers and the shirt. He went into his bedroom and got the clean socks he’d left on his night table. The message light was blinking on his answering machine. Someone must have called while he was in the shower. It was Bennis’s idea to have the answering machine in the bedroom. Gregor thought it was completely nuts. What was the point of an answering machine if it didn’t let you sleep through calls in the middle of the night?

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe they shouldn’t have tried living together, even temporarily. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. It had even seemed necessary. Tibor was out of his apartment, since the place wasn’t structurally sound after the church was bombed. He could take Bennis’s apartment while Bennis stayed with Gregor, which she did most of the time anyway. But there was a real difference between staying the night almost every single night and actually moving in. There was a difference in the way you felt about the way things were done and the places things were put.

He pulled on his socks, then reached onto the bed for his sweater, a good three-ply cashmere one from Brooks Brothers, Bennis’s idea of a Christmas present. He sat down on the edge of the bed and pushed the play button to hear the message. If it was Tibor saying he wasn’t up to going to the Ararat for breakfast, Gregor thought he would smash something.

“Mr. Demarkian?”

Gregor frowned. The voice was, sort of, familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

“Mr. Demarkian, I know it’s only six thirty in the morning, but I remember from when we met before that it’s best to get you early. I hope I haven’t woken you up. I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Edmund George. Chickie. People call me Chickie. We met a couple of years ago when you were consulting with the Philadelphia Police about the, you know, the murders connected to the gay stuff. I’m sorry, it’s early in the morning and I haven’t had my shower yet. Anyway, that’s who I am.”

Gregor actually did remember him, and now he knew what it was that was odd about the voice. The Chickie he had met had been a “flaming queen,” as John Henry Newman Jackman had put it, but not the kind who came by it naturally. It was as if he needed to exaggerate an effeminacy he didn’t really have, as if it wasn’t enough to be “gay,” or even to be “out,” if you didn’t throw it in everyone’s face in a way that they couldn’t possibly ignore it. The voice on the answering machine was not effeminate in any way. If he hadn’t known something about Chickie already, he would not have automatically assumed that the man wasn’t straight, or anything else but another guy with a Philadelphia tinge to his accent, the Italian street kind of Philadelphia twinge. Gregor wondered what Chickie was doing now.

“Anyway,” Chickie was saying, “I don’t want to run out your machine and get cut off, or anything, but I’ve got a problem. Actually, the organization I volunteer with has a problem. And I was thinking, you’re probably the best person in the city to ask about it. So I was wondering if it would be okay if I came over and talked to you. I can come over right this minute, if you want me to. I’m just going to step in the shower and wake myself up, but after that I could be at your place in twenty minutes. I’m not all that far away. It’s the Justice Project I volunteer for, by the way, and it really is important. You can call me back and leave a message on my machine if you want to see me right now, or call later or whatever. At your convenience. I’m at 555–4720. Thanks.”

Gregor sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, thinking. The Justice Project. He’d heard a lot about the Justice Project recently, because of… that was it, the Drew Harrigan drug thing. Gregor hadn’t paid much attention to it. He didn’t like men like Drew Harrigan, no matter which side of the political divide they inhabited. Drew Harrigan, Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, Michael Moore: here was another way his generation was not like Bennis’s, and not like this Chickie’s, either. He had no idea when politics had become this angry, and this ugly, but he hated it instinctively. These days, he didn’t follow debates and he didn’t read editorials. He figured out which of the available candidates came closest to his preferred political identification of “a little common sense, please,” and voted for that.