Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll Read Online Free PDF Page B

and let him know I was after better things. It didn't make me feel trapped or played out that I knew everyone who was gay and good in bed. I was alert and sexy every night about what might turn up in the bars I drank in, and I always took the first or second turn with anyone fine and ripe who did turn up.
    I make it sound as if I were always rid of love, and that is one way of putting it. But fifteen years lived in units of one or two nights go very quickly, like a string of weekends. Heady Friday nights, the calm and aimless hours of a long Saturday, and then the head-on rush to Sunday night, blank and pointless. We all fall into time. To understand how a gay man executes his fall into the day-by-day, one must try to see how wildly he falls in love with his own body, once it becomes his own. Sex is self-inflicted for so long, and a gay man burns to carry out in lust the years he lost to guilt and shame. Fifteen years seems long and tenacious, but in the end it really didn't take. David showed up.
    And for a few years, love won. It is not that David and I spent an uninterrupted time together. He ran away a dozen times, and he brought home half-wit numbers who fucked him in my bed. But for a few years the quality of the affection was steady in me. I mean that. And on the Sunday in June when Madeleine and I drove off to our new survival, on that perfect sea day when the Band-Aid-beige Chevy zinged along like a sloop itself, those three and a half years had been balanced by the five years since. Loveless and pure. My bed blissfully empty, like my mailbox, unlike my bank account. I believed I was testing David, not myself, and I believed I was doing it for his own good. It has not proven to make any difference because, as Madeleine says, these tests are all loaded, and so one feels guilty and lets the other fellow win.
    I met David on horseback at Sea Island, Georgia. I had driven down from Boston with two men I had met a few days earlier at a bad party. They were lovers, more or less, and they had taken me onto the terrace and brought from among their toys a vial of cocaine. Even aspirin gives me a headache; but I will go to considerable lengths, usually three-quarters of the way through a fifth of Dewar's, to wall myself away from a holiday of faggots. My head had an aerial view of things, like a kite strung out from my body. It seemed like a marvelous idea to pack us all three into my gleaming Chevy, put the top down, and head south on a real holiday. (I see there is bound to be an arc in everything. The fawn-colored Chevy was just bought, and it possessed its body as wholly as I did mine. But see, I am a man of reversals. The newer things were then, the less complicated they seemed. General Motors, far from being a bandit then, was more like the tooth fairy.) They wanted me to make love to both of them. The widowed mother of one had abandoned her Georgia house for even warmer waters because the dead father haunted its tiled halls in his banker's grays. The son did not suffer the same ghosts as long as he arrived armed with a lover and a stud.
    I don't care about the sea. I let them go off sailing by themselves during the day, and they were that much more ready to court me at night. I had a chestnut horse. I dressed in high riding boots ($200. Their gift. The boots must have danced in their heads while they sailed) and my beloved Levi's, and the feeling was very like being naked. Better even, like being naked in bed. The Easter sun was hot at midmorning. I rode north on the sand to the preserve at the upper third of the island; and when the houses fronting the water stopped, the jungle began in earnest. Pelicans flew low over the sea, and the herons perked their heads up in the marshes. There was talk of deer playing and chasing on the beach this far away, but I never saw any. Nor any people, until the morning I saw David standing naked in a foot of water, in a tidal pool.
    We came around a spit of land where the view was