Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll Read Online Free PDF

from her, but I think she was afraid I wasn't being honest with myself. She knew all about him but had never met him. David was the most important person from whom I hid the fact of Madeleine's visits. In June I would tell him my mother was coming for a weekend, and he fled gratefully from my apartment. If he returned and found a stray bottle of makeup, a stocking or something, he would throw it away with a shiver. Apprised of the fact that they belonged to Madeleine Cosquer, there is no telling how fanatically he would have souvenired them. David, unlike the Boston press, was as swift as a whippet about celebrity and gossip. He would have skywritten the knowledge that Madeleine holed up in his lover's apartment during the weekend of her concert.
    I was not being innocent in bringing Madeleine with me on my visit to David and his seamy sugar daddy. I knew he was going to faint with complexity when he met her. I didn't want to hurt him (though here I expect I am straining after innocence). I just wanted to break the set of his expectations about me. And Madeleine too seemed to understand that she was to be party to a showdown. For that reason as much as any, she had a right to ask about David. From all that I know about her life, I know she does not shirk a showdown, but she likes to be armed with the evidence to date.
    "I have nothing to do with David," I said, snapping the folded top into place behind the backseat. "I haven't seen him since the day he walked out. I don't think about him anymore, even to hate him and wish him dead. It's all over. But he does call me sometimes. And now he's in Boston again. I said yes. I could have said no."
    She was wrapped in a scarf and dark glasses and looked terrific because there was only the hint of Madeleine Cosquer in the shape of the head, and what it hinted at was how she looked in her youth, which lasted well into her sixties and which certain lights still caught. She looked at me as I got back into the car, listening for something else.
    "You're testing yourself," she said. "I hope I provide the right diversion, because nobody ever passes that sort of test. Maybe I'll sing."
    "I didn't think you sang a note anymore for under a couple of thousand an hour."
    "You're being testy because I'm right. He's a bastard. I want you to come out of there alive."
    I don't know why Madeleine was being so loyal, and I don't remember mentioning David more than two or three times to her, and those lightly. In any case, David is not a bastard, and I expected that she would find him delightful as long as he didn't go idiotic about her celebrity. But I see that I am cornered into talking about David and me. I can do that. It will help to explain what has been so alive in David during this summer when he finally stopped running. It is I whom I would rather leave out, I know. But if I do that, I expect I would be trying to say, to believe really, that I have not been involved. And I am as guilty of having loved us all—David, Madeleine, Phidias, and Aldo—as any of us.
    I am forty-five, and I have lived in Boston during all of my adult life. I inherited some money early, more than was good for me, and I came to the city from my drunken, monkish home on the North Shore and began to make love. (I have to draw the line somewhere, so I am not going to drag my parents in, nor anyone else's. In one way, gay men are forever in the grip of their fathers' wishes and their mothers' lonely afternoons. More truly, though, they have no parents at all, or their parents are ghosts, like the children they never father.) That is all I really did for fifteen years. There was a time when there wasn't a man in Boston I hadn't slept with, though of course it only seemed that way. Of a certain kind of man—thoroughbred, beautiful, hard—I had my fill. I felt discriminating and in control. To be more accurate, then, there was a time when I had cruised every gay man in Boston and either slept with him or looked through him