Faggots by Larry Kramer, Reynolds Price Read Free Book Online Page B

certain streets on certain days at certain times the code might be slightly altered if you knew certain people, and though all of this told all, what did any of it mean ?
    Yes, he thought, to Stendhal and Columbus and Vespucci and Boswell, I must now add Lévi-Strauss.
    Then, striding forth with renewed gusto, pocketing his note pad, momentarily free of any unsettling thoughts, he once again renewed his pledge:
    Yes! I must go forward, continue to go forth and forward, to encounter all and to forge in my smithy the uncreated conscience of my sex!
     
     
     
    Ever since Miss Australian Butter had been replaced by Peetra Kant, a leggy model he’d discovered while viewing a South African documentary on Gold, Abe had seen little of Mrs. Bronstein Number Four. Peetra loved to shop and, since she was an organized young woman with a tendency toward great methodology, she had shopped her way from London, where Abe had viewed her, through New York, where Abe had married her, and was currently applying her vim to Paris, where rumor had it she might be about to deliver forth the third Bronstein heir, before motoring south to St. Paul de Vence for an indefinite purchase.
    So Abe, while instructing his older son and lawyer, Stephen, to prepare papers for divorce and possible custody proceedings, and before setting forth to seek another poopsie to brighten his declining years, moved back in with Ephra.
    It was not that Ephra either wanted him or was forgiving. She would answer “Who wants him?” or “Forgive him?” to a discussion of either topic. But the large Park Avenue apartment she preferred to “that wilderness he gives to me on Lake Candlewood which is not even a natural lake but a man-made lake where once, years ago, we had a happy summer,” was in his name and he still liked to live in it, even though Peetra had insisted they buy the Soho loft, now Richard’s, where Abe had sprained an ankle, perhaps on the night young junior was conceived, disembarking from the circuitous metal staircase from their aerial nuptial bower to make himself a hot Ovaltine to regain his strength.
    Abe, home again on Park and 58th, looked down ten floors and across to where there was once a fine Mayflower donut shop and where there was now only yet another store pushing chotchkies, the chotchkification of America, and spoke to young Fred Lemish.
    “Fred-chen, I worry, I worry. Is the world really ready for a faggot-sexual movie? Are the mommies of this world really ready to learn about the sodomitic activities of their bubbalahs?”
    “Abe, it’s time. I know it. And I must write about what I know. All these years of masquerade, writing Rebecca, thinking Rupert. There’s millions of me now, Abe. The closets are empty. New York has no more full closets. Please, let’s be brave, bold pioneers!”
    “Freddie, New York is not the world. We are more sophisticated. The rest of the world is not sophisticated. The rest of the world is Main Street, the story of a doctor and his young wife. Please, have you given any thought to writing the story of a doctor and his young wife?”
    “Abe, neither of us is interested in medicine. The great innovators, the landmark men, are the ones who went against the current of the main street. Besides, the first respectable faggot Love Story will clean up. Ryan O’Neal and Robert DeNiro together will bring them out of every household, tent, and igloo in the world.”
    “Fred, I am a heterosexual. Everyone I know is a heterosexual. My two sons are heterosexual. What do I know from gay?”
    “Abe, you don’t have to know anything. Leave the driving to me. You would be doing the world a public service. You would be helping to bring knowledge and enlightenment on a much misunderstood and maligned subject to the heathen. You would be rewarded, both on earth and in heaven.”
    “All of these reasons are good ones. Leave me with your thoughts. I am having a dinner appointment with Mr. Randy Dildough from Marathon. He